


Dialogic: Season 7

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Dialogic [9]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Humor, Just Married, Married Couple, Married Life, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-21 15:44:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 26,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20696021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: After watching around to the end of the series (i.e., "Hollander's Woods," because nothing after that exists), and taking some time to watch a few other things during workouts, I'm back around to the beginning of the series again.This story is 23 brief sketches, one for each episode of Season 7, inspired by a line of dialogue from the episode.I did the same thing for Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 but there's no reason you couldn't read this story (or any chapter of any of these stories) independent of the others.





	1. Reboot—Driven (7 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It has been zero days since Kate Beckett, NYPD, last had her heart ripped out of her chest. It has been zero days for the last forty-two, going on forty-three. That’s how long he’s been gone, and every single morning when she wakes, she turns her head on the pillow, she inhales, seeking out the scent of coffee, she reaches across the terrain of covers in search of his hand, his shoulder, his ribs. Every single morning she’s forgotten—she’s convinced herself it’s nothing but a terrible dream—and the counter resets to zero.

> _“For you it must seem like a lifetime ago.”  
—Richard Castle, Driven (7 x01)_

* * *

It has been zero days since Kate Beckett, NYPD, last had her heart ripped out of her chest. It has been zero days for the last forty-two, going on forty-three. That’s how long he’s been gone, and every single morning when she wakes, she turns her head on the pillow, she inhales, seeking out the scent of coffee, she reaches across the terrain of covers in search of his hand, his shoulder, his ribs. Every single morning she’s forgotten—she’s convinced herself it’s nothing but a terrible dream—and the counter resets to zero.

Every day is the worst it’s ever been. Her heart is the most broken, her efforts are the most fruitless, her leads are the most threadbare, and the looks she gets from people she knows— people she doesn’t know who know her, because he’s semi–world famous—are the most pitying, disbelieving, judgmental.

Today has been a little worse even that that.

The FBI has “scaled back” to nothing. Connors has pulled up stakes so entirely that he’s instructed his staff not to interact with her directly—all contact goes through him. She tells herself they’ve been useless anyway, and they have been. Even the friends she thought she had at the Bureau have been reluctant, avoidant, useless.

But the FBI’s withdrawal matters anyway. She has to tell Martha. She has to tell Alexis, and she has to brace for what it symbolizes, what it will mean at the precinct.

Gates has been incredibly generous, incredibly patient in looking the other way about her extra-curricular activities. Lanie, the boys, anyone she’s called on directly for a favor, anyone she’s snapped at or left in the lurch because there was some spark of hope, some lead she had to chase down before it evaporated, they’ve all been patient, they’ve kept their heads down and worked alongside her. They’ve had her back, but for them, it can’t go on forever.

For her, it will go on until she finds him, so today is the day she brings the case home. She pulls down and gathers up the photos, the articles, the notepads filled with strikeouts and endlessly recursive arrows. Today is the day she takes her heartbreak underground.

She goes to her apartment for the night. Martha tries to insist—Alexis tries to insist—that she should be with them at the loft, but she makes her excuses. She smuggles the not quite half-full box out of the precinct and carries it up the back steps. She carries it through the door to her apartment, past the head of Buddha, into the office. She goes to set it down, but her knees give way before she can. The tumbles to the floor as her hands fly to cover mouth, to stifle a cry.

She’d forgotten. How could she have forgotten?

There’s a box already there beneath the window. A brightly colored plastic bin with its cover flaps neatly folded over right now. It’s filled with ridiculous things—a squeegee and rainbow-colored bottles of window cleaner in every imaginable scent. A flick-out razor blade for scraping off tape and a stupid_—stupid—_hammer with a floral-print handle for prying out nails and particularly stubborn thumb tacks.

There are paint chips in colors by the dozen and small sample tins of the colors themselves. There are paint brushes, cleaned and carefully wrapped in wax paper, resting on top of wooden slats that are an exact match for the ones in her shutters. He’d tested out colors already—everything from a butter yellow that’s indistinguishable from what’s there now to a bold brick red, a purple so violent it’s silly.

He’d planned for the future when she couldn’t yet. He imagined what this expanse of glass and wood might look like someday, when she could do no more than reverently take down her mother’s case, piece by piece. He’d presented the bin to her with a flourish—a showy bow to make her laugh. A kiss and quiet words in her ear.

_Not for now. For when you’re ready._

She hadn’t been ready before the wedding. How could she have been? Her heart had been ripped out for five thousand, five hundred and ninety-six consecutive days. It had only been eight short days since Bracken. Eight short days of counting up from zero. She hadn’t been ready to do more than pack away her life’s work, piece by painful piece.

She’s glad now of the patches of tape and the still-patent holes in the wood. She’s glad there are squares of light and dark, old paint that the sun has faded and stark patches where the color is still bold. It feels less insurmountable. She fills in the outline that’s still sketched there—his photo, the first articles, the most recent. Photos of Martha, Alexis, herself. An index card with fury-choked letters in her handwriting_—JACKSON HUNT/ANDERSON CROSS. _

She tacks up the grainy screen capture of him at the dumpster looking furtive. Looking like a sinister, red-eyed stranger. She makes a new index card, a bold, double-headed arrow with the words_IMMEDIATE THREAT _underneath it. She lingers with her pen poised, the question of a question mark hanging in the air. She caps her pen emphatically. There is no question in her mind. She presses it carefully in the space between the screen cap and the photos of Martha, Alexis, herself.

She fills in the shutters, the panes of glass, the window sill, with what she’s had for forty-two days, going on forty-three. She adds new things, leaps of logic and wild conspiracies worthy of him. She lets him speak to her, liberated now from the pitying, disbelieving, judgmental looks of those who love her and those who don’t even know her.

She begins her life’s work anew.

It has been zero days since Kate Beckett, NYPD, last had her heart ripped out of her chest.


	2. Lapse—Montreal (7 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I keep forgetting …

> _“At the moment, our relationship is based on mutual loss.”  
—Martha Rodgers, Montreal (7 x 02)_

* * *

_I keep forgetting … _

The phrase keeps bubbling up in him every time he does something stupid. And he keeps doing stupid things, because he keeps forgetting.

He’s not really sleeping. He’s tired all the time. He’s irritable and quick to whipsaw the other direction into tears. It’s work—so much _work_—trying to slap a layer of normalcy over it all. He’s exhausted, but he can’t manage sleep for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

He lives in fear of waking her, of depriving _her_of yet more sleep, but he’s even more afraid she’ll wake to find him gone—she’ll wake and think his homecoming was nothing more than an exceptionally dissatisfying dream.

So he sits with the laptop most nights. He’ll draw the the armchair even closer to her side of the bed, or if he’s sure she’s down for the count, he’ll risk climbing in on his side.

He burns away the long nights watching dumb videos. He hate clicks on headlines about his disappearance—about his return—then closes the tabs with extreme prejudice half a second later, having read nothing beyond the damning, eye-catching ledes.

He surfs his way through 3 AM online shopping sprees. He buys things that seem vital and necessary in the dead of night. One night, he impulse buys an adorable outfit for Sarah Grace.

He’s not back at the precinct officially. He has book commitments, things he’d already shuffled around before everything, and even though she hasn’t said a word, he knows Beckett needs some time to find her feet again at work. So he’s not back, but a present for the baby seems a good excuse to drop by—_hi everyone, not yet, soon, good seeing you, too_—so he does.

He presents Ryan with the foil gift bag with great fanfare. The outfit is too small. He knows the second Ryan lifts the fancy satin hanger clear of the profusion of tissue paper, that it’s too small by far. There’s a wretched, rotten beat of silence, then everyone laughs. Everyone _ooh_s and _ah_s over the fancy, ruffled little thing anyway, but he’s left cringing. He’s left going hot–cold, hot–cold, hot–cold inside. He stammers out an apology.

_Sorry. Stupid. I’ll send it back. I keep forgetting … _

Retail therapy is a relatively innocuous stop on the path of stupidity, but there’s a pattern. He thinks, he says, he does something stupid and out comes the miserable, painful, stupid phrase.

_I keep forgetting … _

Offering up the reward is the stupidest thing to date. That’s an exponential stupid curve right there.

The worst of it is that he’d thought it was brilliant in the moment. It had felt like such a gratifying, richly deserved _in your face_for Brooke Mediocre Morning Show and her unseen army of critics and fans and Nosy Parkers, but it’s just so stupid.

He knows that as soon as words like _half-baked_and _nut job_start tumbling out of her mouth that of course it’s stupid. She’s already done this part. His disappearance was in the paper for weeks—for months. It was splashed all over mediocre morning shows, and the whole time she must have been positively drowning in “leads” from haters and attention seekers and lost souls ranging from the mildly confused to the seriously unhinged, and now he’s just hit the reset button on all of that and worse. He’s opened the floodgates to cash-motivated cranks, and he wants to apologize. He does apologize when she finally loses patience and sends him home. 

Her phone rings. She gets maybe two and a half words in edgewise before she hangs up, before she has him, literally buttonholed, in some part of Williger Toy’s offices that is devoid of walking pianos and guns with huge magazines of foam darts. He knows before she says a word that Captain Gates must be over her bout of tactical smooch–induced speechlessness.

“Castle, can you please just … at least try to shut down the ones that keep calling?”

She shades her eyes with her hand. She sounds exhausted. She looks exhausted, and he knows then that she’s not really sleeping, either. He looks at her—really looks at her—and sees the changes his missing time has wrought—the short, blunt ends of her hair and the way her clothes hang loosely on her frame. He’s so stupid.

She asks him to go, and he’s going. He’s _going. _

“Kate, I’m sorry,” he says, shamefaced. “But I—”

“Keep forgetting?” She quirks an eyebrow. It’s a joke. A grim one, but a joke nonetheless.

“I do, though.” He gives her a pained smile. “I keep forgetting that the summer’s over and Sarah Grace is huge—”

“I know,” she says quietly. “I was here the whole time, but I missed … I keep forgetting, too.” She hooks the tips of her fingers around his and gives a brief squeeze. “It’s hard. This is really hard.”

It should help, one of them saying it out loud. It should relieve some sort of pressure or lift at least a little of the burden. It does, he supposes. She lifts her eyes briefly to meet his, and for just those few seconds, neither one of them is pretending this is any easier than it is.

“It’s really hard.” He swallows. He shakes his head “I keep forgetting.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Nothing to see here … 


	3. Reticent—Clear and Present Danger (7 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Glad that’s out of the way,” he murmurs in the dark.

> _“Omission is the invisible lie.”  
—Richard Castle, Clear and Present Danger (7 x 03) _

* * *

“Glad that’s out of the way,” he murmurs in the dark.

It’s late, late, late, and the bedroom is an absolutely satisfying wreck. Her body crosses the bed on a diagonal, with her head nearly hanging off the foot on her side and her feet where his pillows should be. Where his pillows are is a mystery, and his body is … somewhere. Far away. Too far away.

“Out of the way!” She casts about blindly with one hand until she finds an ear to tug sharply. “That’s flattering.”

“You were thinking it, too.” His tone is smug, matter of fact. The mattress heaves and rolls beneath her heavy limbs as he army crawls on his elbows from wherever he’s been to blow a raspberry against her ribs. “That’s what all the … determination was about.”

“Determination?” She laughs. Her head tips back over the edge of the bed. Her mouth opens wide. Air rushes into her. It fills her up, and she l_aughs _because she was thinking it, too. From the moment she’d shucked her clothes with record speed and struck her sultry, _determined _pose on the far side of the bedroom, she’d been thinking something very much like _Let’s get this out of the way, _but she wants him to tell her about it. She wants, in a languid sort of way, to make his kind of sense of it. “And what was I determined to do?”

“Me,” he heaves a dreamy sigh and shifts to make a pillow of her. “Again and again.”

“And one more again.” It’s her turn to be smug, and she is. She preens and stretches all the way to her toes while he laughs against her belly.

They fall silent together. His breath finds the rhythm of hers and the sounds of traffic waft upward from Broome. Sweat dries on her skin, on his, and the world grows cool enough that one of them should probably do something about it. One of them should probably solve the mystery of the pillows, the sheets, the duvet.

“What’s that about?” she asks instead. She lapses into her usual, not exactly flattering imitation of him as she adds, “Out of the way.”

“For you?” He turns his head. He plants his chin against her rib cage and levels his gaze at her. “Or me?”

“Isn’t it the same?” She flicks a dismissive hand at him. She wants him to tell her about it, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know what’s going on. “It’s the same.”

“Mostly the same,” he says. He rises up on his elbows. He climbs high enough to loom over her, to look her body up and down with a heated glance neither one of them could make good on right now if their lives depended on it. “We both got shy.”

“Shy about what?” That makes her grumble. It makes her push back, literally and metaphorically as she arches her spine and rolls her shoulders so the low copper light of the bedside lamp plays over her breasts. “Who’s _shy?” _

She’s trying too hard. His point is made, but he concedes anyway. He continues his climb up the bed—up her body—with meek, tiny kisses until they’re both on a diagonal to everything. He settles beside her with his head pillowed on one arm.

“Me.” He closes his eyes and ducks his head to press one more kiss to her shoulder. “Shy about everything.”

He reaches out to find her hand. His fingers make a stop at each rib along the way, and her skin goes the not-so-nice kind of hot. The bones are sharp and too prominent. They’re stark enough to cast shadows with all the weeks he was gone. It’s one thing she has to be shy about. Just one thing she _is _shy about, but he knows enough to gloss over it. He knows enough to take her hand and move the narrative forward. He settles her palm over his own ribs, over the rough, raised scar where someone’s bullet grazed him, who knows where, who knows when, who knows why.

It shocks her. It still shocks her, though she manages not to pull back. She manages, with an effort they’re both all too aware of, not to gasp or recoil. Her fingers explore its contours instead. They map its margins and terrain.

“This?” Her teeth come together hard. They trap a strange flash of anger in the confines of her mouth.

She hates whoever did this to him. She hates whoever first saw and tended to the wound and she hates the strangers who’ve pored over it since—the coastguard medic and the stone-faced doctors, even Lanie. The idea of any eyes—any hands—on his body but hers makes her furious.

“This?” she says again, fierce now as she flips, quick as a flash, to pin his body to the bed. He gasps as her fingernails dig into his skin, her teeth sink into his shoulder. He groans helplessly into her neck as her hips roll against his. “Nothing to be shy about.”


	4. Fabrication—Child's Play (7 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s not much of a liar lately. It’s kind of a problem. It’s kind of a big problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I don’t think anyone is as nutty as I about this, but there are extremely—I mean EXTREMELY—vague spoilers for Raging Heat and Driving Heat in this.

> _“Every scribble is like a fingerprint.”  
—Leslie Ruiz, Child’s Play (7 x 04)_

* * *

He’s not much of a liar lately. It’s kind of a problem. It’s kind of a _big _problem.

His charm depends on the white lie, the smooth conversational transition that’s really a bank shot—an abrupt and total redirection away from the thing he doesn’t know, won’t admit, doesn’t want to talk about. He’s failing big time on the charm front. Mrs. Ruiz hates him, and with good reason. Jason hates him, says his books suck, catches him with his pants wet and grassy, and when you’ve got no comeback up to the job of taking down an unlikeable eight-year-old, you’re seriously failing on the charm front—you’re failing at the all-important white lie.

The restoration of peace to hearth and home depends on shades-of-gray lies: _I’m good, never better, slept like a baby, wrote a bunch. _They’re all telling those. His mother and Alexis. He and Kate. It’s not a contest, but he’s bringing up the rear there, too. He’s fooling no one, though they all pretend that he is. They tell their own top-quality lies, and he’s bringing the team down. They’ll never bring home the gold with his dead weight.

The problem—the _real _problem from which all other lie-based problems emanate—is the fact that he can’t lie on the page. He hasn’t written a word since he’s been back. He cannot write a word, and he’s like a pinwheel without a pin. He’s a series of dangerous blades, spinning promiscuously around no particular axis.

There’s a kind of lying he does—a kind of lying he’s always done when it comes to writing—that hasn’t quite failed him yet. He learned early on to stockpile, to never give anyone, even himself—especially himself—everything he’s done on anything. He withholds a page or two from an overdue chapter, a couple dozen words that slosh over the edge of the page count he’d aspired to on a particular day. He keeps a scene, a plot point, a much-needed emotional beat tucked up his sleeve. He curls himself around them like a dragon with his tail flicking ceaselessly over his little hoard, then doles them out in tiny bits when he’s really stuck.

He’s managed that kind of lying, so far. Alexis clamors for pages, because that’s normal. Right about now, even carving out three weeks for the honeymoon that wasn’t—two weeks before that for the aborted flight into Canada—he should have blurt drafts of a few chapters. But he doesn’t, so he fills the doorway to the vault with the breadth of his shoulders. He surreptitiously snatches out a few cheap pieces from the very edges of the hoard and hopes they’re a convincing place to start.

They’re not a convincing place to start.

“Dad, these are all the end of the last one.” Alexis’s face crumples in confusion, disappointment, worry. “Right after the proposal!”

They are. They are Nikki saying yes, Nikki saying no, Nikki joining the circus, Rook joining the CIA. They are unusable nonsense, so he pretends to confess.

“Stuck,” he says, trying to remember how his face should look, where his hands go, what his posture should be when that’s all it is. “Not sure where to pick up yet, so they’re just springboards.”

“Springboards.” She nods and pretends she believes him.

She doesn’t believe him, though. He’s not much of a liar lately. She calls in the cavalry.

He’s sitting in the dark of his office, at the desk, not in one of the big chairs, because discipline might help? Rigor, discomfort, method, habit—one of them has to fucking help. None of them, to date, has helped.

She scares the shit out of him. She’s behind him, heavy hands on his shoulders, voice right in his ear before he even registers she’s there.

“Kate!” he shouts, splitting the black.

“Sorry,” she says, not really sounding like it. She comes around the front of the chair and plants her hips on on the edge of the desk. “I called you. I was calling.”

“Caught up, I guess.” He gestures to the keyboard and tries to sound sheepish. _Blurrier, _he thinks. _More broken sentences._That’s how he sounds when he’s writing, isn’t it?

“In not writing?”

Now she sounds sorry. She sounds deeply, world-without-end sorry and the lie—even the pathetic excuses for lies he’s been telling lately—won’t come.

“I can’t anymore,” he mumbles down at his useless hands. “At all.”

“That’s silly.” She slides from the desk into his lap. “Of course you can.”

She’s a better liar than he is. She’s a great liar, warm and fierce with her arms around his neck, but a liar nonetheless.

“I really can’t.” He buries his face against her shoulder. His breath comes in short, tight bursts. It hardly comes at all. “There’s nothing.”

“You’ve been stuck before,” she scoffs. “How do you get unstuck?”

It’s a blank at first. It’s a punch to the midsection that drives out what little air there is for him to work with. He can’t think what he does—what he’s done before—when he’s really, truly stuck. Then he does remember. Then it’s literally on the tip of his tongue as he opens his mouth against the skin the wide neck of her sleep shirt leaves bare. “I make up elaborate excuses to follow beautiful women around until they say they’ll marry me one day,” he says with a miserable laugh.

“One day.” She pinches his side. She gives him a savage kiss, then a gentle one. “One day,” she says again as she settles herself against him once more. “So that’s off the table. What’s Plan B?”

“No Plan B.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

He hopes she’ll say something. He hopes she’ll rescue him, but she waits him out. She lets the black knit itself together again and press in on him—on the two of them. He sighs. He forces himself to calm, to breathe, to cast about for the most fundamental thing.

“If you can tell a story, you can write a story.” It doesn’t sound any more convincing now than it did in the hateful sing-song of the day before. “But I can’t tell it. I don’t know it.”

“You don’t know it.” Her voice sounds tight. Unhappy, but she rallies. She shakes it off for him. For _him. _“Do you have to tell that one?”

“I think so?” It’s the heart of it. He kind of hates her for swooping in and finding that out straight away. He kind of hates himself for tripping over it and tripping over it and never once seeing it. “I can’t _not _tell it. But I don’t know it.”

“You do,” she insists. “You know some of it.” She drops her cheek against the crown of his head. “You know how you came home.”

“In a sky blue dinghy,” he snorts. It’s an ugly sound in the hollow of her shoulder, but it catches him—the ludicrous mouth feel of the word. “Dinghy,” he says again.

His fingers twitch toward the desk. The sharp movement startles her.

“Castle?” she sits up straight. She gathers herself as if to go, but he hems her body in with straight arms on either side as he reaches to slam a thumb down on the space bar.

“Stay.” He ducks his head around her rib cage. He lands an inelegant kiss somewhere in the neighborhood of her armpit and she swats at him. “Just a second.” He kisses her there again and gets a second swat as he bangs out the words on the empty page.

_Dinghy._

_Sky blue._

“Okay.” He breathes as hard as if he’s just finished a marathon in under three. “Okay.”

“Okay?” She leans in, narrow-eyed. She squints at the meager harvest before he moves to bring the lid down. She stops its progress with an incredulous hand. “That’s it?” 

_That’s it, _he’s about to say. He’s about to point out that it’s infinity more words than existed a minute ago—the division-by-zero truth he tells himself in desperate times. He almost tells it to her, but inspiration strikes again. He taps back to the not-quite-blank document.

_Celeste pallido. _

“Now that’s it.” He closes the lid with infinite satisfaction. “That’s it for now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A super, overly long thing about writer’s block. Ha! Oy.


	5. Black Ops—Meme is Murder (7 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s feeling epically sorry for himself. She’s feeling restless, reckless, rebellious. She has a plan, so him feeling sorry for himself kind of works out for the moment. It keeps him occupied while she lays the groundwork.

> _“With follows and fans, all this attention, I felt like I was losing her. Like there was no room left for the two of us. ”  
—Carlos Villegas, Meme is Murder (7 x 05) _

* * *

He’s feeling epically sorry for himself. She’s feeling restless, reckless, rebellious. She has a plan, so him feeling sorry for himself kind of works out for the moment. It keeps him occupied while she lays the groundwork.

“It was supposed to be cool,” he calls out sullenly from the bed. He’s slouched there with what might be every pillow in Manhattan arrayed around him and the laptop balanced on his flannel-clad thighs. “This is _so _not cool.”

“All publicity …” Her voice comes, muffled, from the depths of the walk-in closet. She hops from foot to foot, out of her jeans, into the close-fitting pants. She takes care in her teasing. The wallowing is a good distraction for the moment, so she takes care, keeping her tone light as she struggles to pop her head out of the mouth of the black turtleneck, out of the closet door. “I’d swear there’s someone I know who’s always going on about all publicity being … what was it now?”

“There’s an asterisk,” he grumbles.“All publicity is good publicity is good publicity unless there’s auto-tune and a cutout of your head as a bouncing sing-a-long ball.”

“They think your tiny, bouncing-ball head is adorable.” She emerges from the closet in head-to-toe black with a bundle of clothes in tow—his clothes, carefully chosen. He doesn’t notice. He can barely be bothered to pout at her sideways as she roughs a hand over his hair en route from the closet to the bathroom.

“You’re just saying that.” He turns a scowl so black on the screen, she half expects the laptop to burst into flames.

“I _wish _I were just saying that.” She rolls her eyes as she imagines the back-and-forth in every comments section known to man. “You have no idea how much I wish I were just saying that, Castle.”

She steps out of sight and into the _en suite_. She loses the sense of his words as she snatches up the wide paddle brush from the counter and sets to work brushing her hair straight back, none too gently. She can still hear the indignant rise and fall of his voice, the ups and downs of pitch that let her make the right noises in the right places, but she loses the sense of it.

She works at her hair until it’s scraped back into a short tail held tight in her fist. It’s a severe look that doesn’t apologize for the sharpness of her cheekbones or the angular bridge of her nose. It’s striking and different. That’s how she feels. It’s how she wants to feel tonight.

She pushes her long, dark sleeves up to the elbow and reaches to turn on the taps. She bends at the waist, water pooled and waiting in her cupped hands. She’s a millisecond from splashing her face, scrubbing it clean of this skin-crawling day, but she changes gears. She turns off the water with two deft flicks of the wrist and grabs her make-up bag instead. She works with heavy pencil and strategic swipes. She follows some guiding instinct until she pushes off the counter with flat palms, until she stands straight, dead center in the mirror and sees a stranger.

The transformation is startling, not just the hair, the face, the clothes, but the posture, the wholly unfamiliar way her head sits poised over her shoulders, and the alien thrust of one hip in front of the rest of her body. She narrows her eyes in satisfaction. She grabs up the bundle of clothes and heads back into the bedroom, where the wallowing is still in progress.

“Get dressed.” She tosses the bundle of clothes on to the bed.

“Dressed? Why?” The midstream interruption makes him blink, but no more than that. She doesn’t have his full attention yet. 

“Because I said so.” She tugs the power cord from his laptop.

“You know that’s not how laptops work.” He looks up at her, grumpily bemused until he sees her—really sees her—then he swallows hard. “Right?”

“You know I can use it for target practice if you don’t get dressed.” She leans over him. She snaps the lid shut for emphasis. “Right?”

_Now _she has his full attention.

“Dressed,” he mutters. He ditches the laptop quickly—_quickly_—somewhere in the depths of the Manhattan Pillow Mountain Range. “You’re dressed.”

His fingers close around her wrist and he pulls sharply. She falls. She lets herself fall, rolling as soon as she hits the mattress so she winds up on the far side of his body with the neat bundle of clothes between them.

“I am. You need to be.” She thrusts the clothes toward him. She arches her back and stretches out to her full length. “We’re going out.”

“Out.” He frowns. His eyes skitter in the direction of the now-hidden laptop, then back to her. “Out is … people are mean _Out.”_

“They’re mean,” she says, surprised to find herself agreeing. “They’ve been mean to both of us.” 

“I’m sorry.” He bats the clothes away to find her hand. “You didn’t ask for this.”

He shakes his head down at the expanse of mattress between them. It’s an abrupt shift into sorrow—real sorrow—and she knows something about the way he’s been throwing himself into the spotlight lately that she didn’t know a minute ago.

She knows it’s mostly about him, because that’s who he is, what he likes, what he needs to be much of the time, but it’s a little bit about her, too. The way he’s careful to never refer to her by name on camera, in ink, and the way he’s sharp-eyed and wary whenever they’re out and about without benefit of uniforms and crime scene tape. It’s a little bit about the time she spent in the spotlight, the time she had to spend there while he was gone. The time she does not want to spend there now.

She knows that this—the head-to-toe black and a face in the mirror that’s almost a stranger’s—is mostly about her, but a little about him. It’s about the breathing room that only a seething city street can afford either of them—both of them.

“You didn’t either,” she says. She shakes herself. “Not most of it. So get dressed.”

He shakes himself, too. He chases her clumsily around the room, shucking pajama pants and hopping into the pair of black jeans she’s picked out. He grumbles his way through pulling on the dark sweater, then finally catches her around the waist in the full-length mirror.

“We look like secret agents.” He frames her body from behind, broad-shouldered where she is tall and lithe. “What’s our mission?”

“Us,” she says, taking him by the hand. “We’re the mission.”

She pulls him through the loft and out the front door. She leads their clattering way down the back steps and out into the alley, where there’s no one looking for them. There’s no van or shitty clown car full for freelancers with long lenses. There’s no clump of foot traffic that slows as everyone’s eye is drawn up to the building they vaguely recognize from a hundred different newscasts on fifty different days when there was nothing new—absolutely nothing.

The city takes them in its arms.

She tugs him and he tugs her down crowded streets. She tugs him and he tugs her into the back row of a dark movie theater showing God knows what. They laugh in the wrong places and feed each other popcorn. They make out like desperate teenagers with nowhere else to be for a little bit of goddamn privacy.

The mission is them.


	6. Cahoots—Time of Our Lives (7 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s so much to do after she says Yes. There’s just so much. They make decisions quickly—furtively—but it’s daunting. It’s harrowing all the things they have to do to make Right Now happen.

_“Kate, okay, you know what? You got me.”   
—Richard Castle, The Time of Our Lives (7 x 06) _

* * *

There’s so much to do after she says _Yes. _There’s just _so much. _They make decisions quickly—furtively—but it’s daunting. It’s harrowing all the things they have to do to make _Right Now _happen.

“The Hamptons,” he says before she can ask. “Still the Hamptons.”

He wants that. Even though it was a Hail Mary of a Plan B to begin with, he wants to meet her at that altar like he was supposed to. He’s prepared to push. He’s prepared to beg and lay out his million-point case for why it has to be the Hamptons, but she kisses him like the two of them are in on the conspiracy of the century, and that part’s settled. 

“Who?” she asks. Her eyes dart toward the bullpen.

“Us?” He sounds uncertain at first, then not uncertain at all. He follows her gaze and sees Ryan and Esposito with their heads down, tying up the loose ends of the case. It’s such a strangely ordinary problem. He’d love to pluck their handful of people out of the din—Ryan, Esposito, Lanie. He knows she’d love that, too, but it’s not that simple. Even seeing just the boys, thinking about plucking them out, he sees delays and second guessing. He hears the whisper of doubt and judgment snaking its way all the way around the bullpen, the floor, the precinct, like a firecracker with a short, quick wick. He sees _complications, _and he is _done _with that. “Mother and your dad. Alexis. Just us.”

She looks relieved—immediately relieved—and he’s relieved that she’s relieved. That his answer was as right as the wide smile of her _Yes. Right Now. _It’s almost as right as that.

“The license.” She chews her lip. “We’ll need a new one.” There’s a little bit of sorrow peppering the air around her. Of course there’s a little bit of sorrow, when it comes to painful details like that—a hard-won piece of paper that was already no good before he made his way back to her. There’s sorrow like blue–green sparks popping up from salt-stained wood, but it’s nothing compared with the joy of this. It’s nothing to how _determined_she is in the midst of this chaos. “Castle, there’s … we’ll have to wait. Twenty four—” She stops herself. She pulls out of the spiral and lights up the world with another wide smile. “You know a guy, right?”

“I do. Of course I do.” He rushes to reassure her before he’s sure he actually does know the right kind of guy. She’s looking at him—beaming at him—with such absolute confidence. But after two heartbeats of blank terror, a name and a couple of back-up names present themselves and he beams right back. “I know a guy—a county judge. He can waive the waiting period.”

“Then you’re on that. What else? What _else?” _She taps a knuckle against her lips. “The rings?”

“Dresser. Your top left drawer.” He sidesteps the dirty look she gives him for being so swift with the answer. The dirty look she gives him for snooping. “I’ll have Mother—” He autocorrects on the fly. “I’ll have _Alexis _grab those and bring them with her.” He thinks a minute. He pictures his closet out in the Hamptons. It’s full of short-sleeved shirts and light linen things that won’t do at all. “Clothes, too. I’ll have her …” He looks at Kate in utter consternation. The ruins of two dresses—one of them her mother’s—suddenly rise up before him like phantoms. He doesn’t have a guy for that. “Do you have … clothes?”

“Clothes!” She laughs at how small his voice has gotten—at how stricken he must look. She laughs right into his chest as she curls her fists around his lapels, then propels him away from her, mindful of the fishbowl they’re occupying. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Ok,” he says, still a little quiet, because … her _mother’s dress, _but he moves past it. He follows her lead. “So I’m on license and rings, and you’re—”

“My dad.” It’s her turn to be quiet now. Her turn to retreat for just a second into small-voiced uncertainty. “I need to call my dad, right away.” She looks around the interview room. She looks at the bullpen through the window and closes her eyes as though all the sounds—the phones, the conversations, the clatter of rolling chairs with bum wheels—are pressing in on her. “I’m going to go downstairs and call my dad.”

“Ah, the tranquility of a Manhattan street. Ideal for all your intimate conversation needs.” He teases her, even as he ushers her toward the door. “Go. Go, on! My calls are easier.”

She’s on her way with another dirty look for that, but she stops in the doorway. She stops with her knuckles suddenly white on the frame.

“You’ll be here when I get back,” she says, half turning. It’s a question and an order and a plea. For the briefest of moments, sorrow wins out in a shower of painful, blue-green sparks. Sorrow and pain and fear and loss win out, but just for the briefest of moments. “We’ll go together this time.”

He’s with her in an instant. He crowds up behind her body with his hands on her shoulders. He wants to hold her as tight as he can. He wants to gather her up and drive out the last vestiges of all the terrible things he’s made her endure, but she said _Yes _and _Us _and _Right Now _and he can’t risk any more chaos with something so out of the ordinary for them. He settles for hands on her shoulders and the quietest, calmest, most certain words he can manage, low in her ear.

“I will be here.” Time stops. It genuinely feels as if it stops, and the world is quiet and just big enough for the two of them. “We’ll go together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This was going to be something entirely different. And then it was this.


	7. Extraordinary—Once Upon a Time in the West (7 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s strange. Being married. Getting used to being married while they’re so far from home is strange. And they are sofar from home—literally far, mentally far. They’re far from home in every way she can think of. It’s strange.

> _“Admit it. You’re impressed.”  
—Richard Castle, Once Upon a Time in the West (7 x 07)_

* * *

It’s strange. Being married. Getting used to being married while they’re so far from home is strange. And they are _so_far from home—literally far, mentally far. They’re far from home in every way she can think of. It’s strange. 

_Good strange, right?_

He asks her that again and again, and she can’t even remember if she said it or he said it in the first place—_This is strange. _But he asks her in a voice that’s pleasantly worn out and dreamy when his body is tucked behind hers in the huge tin tub in the not-very-authentic, but much more comfortable suite they move to once their real honeymoon commences.

He sidles up and asks her, a little smugly, when her jaw drops and she can’t do anything more than breathe, because there are _so many stars _and the world out here is loud and alive in a way she never imagined it could be. And he asks her, a little frightened, when she casually observes that she hasn’t had a latte in seventy-two hours. He asks her, curled around her and conspiratorial, by the light of a campfire without another soul around for miles and miles and miles.

_Good strange, right? _

It is good strange, but it’s strange nonetheless. She feels like a different person, and it’s hard to sort out where that’s coming from. It’s hard not to think it’s this place—this part of the world where the sky begins, night and day, at the far reach of her fingertips. There’s so much _nothing _here—no crowds, no traffic, no ringing phones or unwelcome heads popping into view in the middle of a moment the two of them were about to have—and she feels like a different person. She feels like this giddy, girlish, sentimental stranger.

She feels, she thinks, like his wife, and it’s strange to think that two rings and a handful of words might really be what makes the difference.

She dashes after him when he’s on the trail of some new adventure, because hunting for gold is just the beginning of it. She leads the way on one or two or three adventures of her own, because she hasn’t ridden her bike in forever, and she never did get a pony, and here they are, holding up the world together.

She kisses him soundly wherever they happen to be. She stares unabashedly at him in his cowboy clothes and goes up on tiptoe to whisper that she likes the hat, she thinks he’s cute, and _hey, guess what? we’re married. _She tears up when he sings old folk songs by the fire or wherever they are, wherever they’re going at the moment. She holds his hand and toys with his wedding ring. She toys with her own and raises it up to the light when she should be admiring the sunset.

And she_is_admiring the sunset. She’s admiring the way the wind roars out here sometimes and the heat that just pushes against every cell of her body, baked into the earth as it is. She’s drinking in the sight of him and this alien landscape, and it feels like there’s so much time for everything, even though it’s just a few days. Too few. _Too few. _

She hasn’t answered him outright. She’s given him coy smiles and stuck her tongue out at him. She’s casually mentioned that she really took to hog-tying, and she’s let one hand drop idly to the pearl handle of her shiny new six shooter. She’s given the strings of corsets and petticoats a dramatic tug and crooked a beckoning finger from the high iron bedstead. She’s knocked back shots in the saloon and backed him hard against whatever surface is handy. She’s hooked her arm through his murmured that it’s high time he took her to bed or she took him to bed. But she hasn’t answered him outright, and then it’s time to go.

It’s past time to go, and they’re going to be _so late, _but neither of them could resist lingering over one more sunrise far from the ranch with their horses grazing nearby. Neither one of them could resist standing with their arms looped around one another’s waists, perfectly still, with the sky just beyond the reach of their fingertips, but now they’re going to be so late. 

They’re dashing around the suite, making a mess of packing. He tries to tell her they can get someone to do this for them—that he’ll hand over whatever amount of cash it takes to have someone else deal with gathering up all the things they’ve accumulated and all the the things they’ve flung to the far reaches of the room.

He’s right. There’s no end to the things they keep turning up under the bed and behind the tub and on top of … something made of antlers, and they’re out of time.

She knows he’s right, but everything is strange, and she doesn’t know how to tell him that she’s not sure what she’ll want—what she’ll _need _right away—back in New York. Because she already misses this time they’ve had, and it might be that she needs this particular shirt of his, with the scent of that specific campfire or that exact barn dance trapped in its coarse fabric, to keep the longing for all this at bay.

She knows he’s right. She knows she’s being silly and sentimental, but why not? Why shouldn’t she be? She’s his wife and he’s her husband and she doesn’t care if they’re going to be late. She doesn’t care, so she rushes ahead of him and flattens herself against the door to the outside world. She pulls him to her by his plain old button down and gives him a sweet, silly, sentimental kiss. She whispers her answer in the last possible moment in this place with all the _nothing _it has to offer.

_It’s good strange._


	8. Lean on Me—Kill Switch (7 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He always feels a little helpless—a little on the useless side—when a case hits unexpectedly close to home. It’s a paradox on the surface. He is, by nature and nurture alike, dramatic, emotional, demonstrative. He’s the one who’s not honor bound by his professional to downplay, set aside, disregard all the feelings something like this stirs up, and with one of their own on the line, it seems like that should be useful, because it’s just like any other case, and it’s not at all like any other case. It should be the he can carry it for them all—guilt, worry, fear, empathy. He should be able to take up that part of the burden so they can get on with the work of it, but that’s not how it goes.

> _“Bonds forged in the heat of battle. You know how it is.”  
—Marisa Aragon, Kill Switch (7 x 08)_

* * *

He always feels a little helpless—a little on the useless side—when a case hits unexpectedly close to home. It’s a paradox on the surface. He is, by nature and nurture alike, dramatic, emotional, demonstrative. He’s the one who’s not honor bound by his professional to downplay, set aside, disregard all the feelings something like this stirs up, and with one of their own on the line, it seems like that _should _be useful, because it’s just like any other case, and it’s not at all like any other case. It _should _be the he can carry it for them all—guilt, worry, fear, empathy. He should be able to take up that part of the burden so they can get on with the work of it, but that’s not how it goes.

It’s certainly not how it goes when Lanie shows up at the precinct. He feels especially helpless then.

The sight of her is startling. She’s out of context—out of character, for lack of a better term. He’s always thought of her as a kind of bright, chaotic element in their merry little band, with her unclouded smile and her ability to draw the line between her work and her life in a way that too frequently eludes the rest of them. But that’s not the woman who seems to stand before him now, and he stands dumbly, rooted to the spot, doing nothing for anyone. 

_Helpless. _

It’s Kate who goes to her without hesitation. It’s Kate who embraces her friend and reassures her with an overflowing warmth that’s out of context—out of character—except it’s not. It’s not at all, at least not anymore. He thinks there was a time when such an open display of emotion would not have come so easily to her, but that was then and this is now. This is painfully now.

He watches, in awe of her. In awe of the two of them, really, as the whole terrible situation just keeps unfolding. He’s only just heard Beckett’s end of a hard conversation with Ryan—his ear for dialogue has filed away her steady reassurance that he did nothing wrong. That there’s nothing right he failed to do. It has cataloged the cadence of her clipped, unquestionable tone when she has to order him to go where he’s most useful, not where he feels like he ought to be, and it has registered the fact that this give and take is both like and wholly unlike the unhesitating moment of grace and vulnerability between her and Lanie.

He doesn’t know what to do with himself in the moment, other than give them their space—whatever modicum of privacy the confines of the precinct and the realities of the situation can afford them. So he withdraws. He goes to work—back to the first principles he learned from her. There is a murder, there is a victim, there is a connection.

He sifts doggedly, dispassionately, ploddingly through Paul Reeves’ files.

Lanie sets aside her worry and fear. She willingly, with a clear head and the full force of her knowledge and professional skills, reviews the footage from the subway car. She homes in on Jared Stone. She filters out the image of the man she loves navigating an impossible situation and bearing the full weight of it on his shoulders. She calmly tells them all how bad it is, how soon it is going to get much,_much _worse. 

It makes the difference. That unflinching examination—that ability to love Javier enough to set her heart aside and go to work—pulls exactly the loose thread that needs pulling. It pulls exactly the thread that needs pulling to save him and so many others after he’s already saved himself.

He feels a swell of warmth, relief, gratitude that it turns out he was any help at all. But mostly he’s in awe of these two women and the way they have held each other up and gotten each other through, and when Javier is finally there, back with them, he tells her so.

“You were wonderful,” he says with a surreptitious squeeze of her hand as they watch Lanie and Javier cling to each other.

“Me?” She turns to him, smiling hard, but she can’t hide her surprise. “Just did the usual.”

“That’s not what Lanie sees.” He says the hell with surreptitious. He lets go her hand and wraps his arms around her. “That’s not what I see.”


	9. Retrospective—The Last Action Hero (7 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s feeling a little quiet when she gets back to the loft. She takes a moment at the door, marking the occasion—the other end of the event that begin with flipping the light switch for the last time at her place. She takes a moment, then feels foolish about it. She shakes herself and makes her way inside.

> _“We’re passionate people. Things got stormy at times.”  
—Kat Kingsley, Last Action Hero (7 x 09)_

* * *

She’s feeling a little quiet when she gets back to the loft. She takes a moment at the door, marking the occasion—the other end of the event that begin with flipping the light switch for the last time at her place. She takes a moment, then feels foolish about it. She shakes herself and makes her way inside.

“I’m home—” she calls out, unnecessarily as it happens. He’s not off in the study, laying out snacks, setting up their movie night. He’s not flopped in a chair, halfway through the first _Hard Kill _because he couldn’t wait, or lost deep in the DVD extras as she thought he would be.

“Oh.” His voice comes from nearby. Right near by. His head peeks from around the corner of the coat closet. “I thought you’d be a little longer.”

“Did you?” She narrows her eyes as she opens the door of said closet to ditch her jacket. “And what action movie plan am I disrupting?”

“No plan,” he says quickly, then amends, “No action movie plan.” 

He comes down the few steps form the landing to meet her—to distract her—but it’s a lost cause. The thing he’s trying to pull her focus from draws the eye to say the least.

“The painting,” she says. She’s two for two in absolutely unnecessary things to say. The thing is eight feet tall and nearly as wide as the landing it’s currently resting on. “My painting.”

“I wanted to have it hung by the time you got home.” He trails after her as the gravitational pull of the massive canvas tugs her toward the stairs. “I had a couple of the delivery guys help me get it this far. But I wasn’t sure the wall anchors for the subway print would hold it, and I was worried it would fall. I thought I’d have time to figure it out. I thought you’d be a little longer at the old—“ He’s babbling, then he’s not babbling. He hangs his head. “At your place.”

She doesn’t ask how he knows where she went tonight. The quiet feeling rolls over her again. She curls her fingers into fists that smell like wood shavings and a well-oiled pocket knife. She doesn’t wonder how he knows she went to say goodbye, because of course he knows.

“What’s the rush?” she asks instead. She inclines her head toward the landing, toward his unexpected, non–action movie plan. 

He shrugs in the way he does when he’s composing a response. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, and that means he’s arguing with whatever response he’s just composed. She thinks about jumping in—saving him from the crisis of a rogue internal monologue—but she’s feeling a little quiet.

“I was a jerk,” he says at last. He looks from the toes of their almost-touching shoes, then at her. “About moving out of your place.”

She lets him sweat long enough that she’s sure he knows. Just long enough, then she relents. “Jerk is a little strong.”

“But only a _little _strong?” He gives her puppy-dog eyes, hoping for more of a break.

“Only a little.” She laughs. She takes his hand and tugs him to sit on the stairs with their backs to the painting. She toys with his fingers, staring down at her shoes, the stairs, anything. She’d like to be done with this, but the last moments stay with her. She relives the pleasant vertigo of the step ladder, high above the kitchen, looking over the open, echoing place and feels the sharp slice of hurt at the memory of him—_Doesn’t matter now. _

“I get—“ He twists himself into her field of view. “I, of all people, know it’s hard to let go of things.” He rights himself so they’re side by side. “I shouldn’t have been so … blithe about you moving out. I know how much happened for you there, how much you accomplished.” He sighs. “I know you loved it.”

“You didn’t, though,” she says, and she’s not sure why. She’s at peace with closing the door on more than three years of her life—or closer to it anyway. She’s satisfied with his apology, and still she bumps his shoulder with her own and prods. “Not just the creaky floors.”

“But Mr. Kubiak—” he protests. She swats at him. It’s a diversion but not really. He breaks, and only then does she realize what this is. It’s an interrogation. “I worried.” He lifts their joined hands and makes a vague gesture at the painting looming behind them. “It … worried me that you wanted to hold on to the place.”

“One foot out the door,” she says faintly. Her stomach does an amusement park drop and rise, but he pushes back.

“No. Not like that.” He shakes his head at her testily, but a long slow breath comes next. A tip of his head to the side as he considers it. “Not really like that.” He lifts her knuckles to his lips. “And not for a long time. I don’t know … I’m not sure where that stuff came from yesterday.”

She is. Listening to this part of the story there on the stairs—hearing it from his point of view—she knows where it came from for both of them. It’s a fight they never had, and not just because of all the hard lefts and rights their story has taken since they’ve been together. Not just because of DC, then not DC, and Pi and not Pi and all of that.

It’s something—an important something—they let go on in the background when they should have met it head on. She’s sure it didn’t need to be a fight, and it wouldn’t have been if they’d gotten in the habit of actually talking earlier on. It didn’t need to be a fight then, and she’s sure it doesn’t need to be one now. Certainly not right now. She has a plan—an action-movie plan.

“Make it up to me.” She hauls herself up and him with her. “And then I’ll make it up to you.”

“To me?” He’s eager and confused and contrite all at once. It’s all knotted up in a cross between a scowl and a grin. “What do you—?”

“Every man has his price,” she growls in the worst imitation of Rico Cruz she can muster. She stops abruptly enough that he stumbles into her. She presses herself against him, seductive as a B-movie archaeologist. “Name yours and we can end this.” 


	10. Exigent—Bad Santa (7 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s wholly preoccupied, head down and contemplating his immediate, largely silent, future with Rocco “Chief of Security” Carlucci, when a hand comes out of nowhere and hauls him by the shirtfront into one of the work rooms off the bullpen.

> _“Are you morons ready?”   
—Cyber Rita, Bad Santa (7 x 10) _

* * *

He’s wholly preoccupied, head down and contemplating his immediate, largely silent, future with Rocco “Chief of Security” Carlucci, when a hand comes out of nowhere and hauls him by the shirtfront into one of the work rooms off the bullpen.

“What?” he squints in the dim light. The room is windowless, it’s one of the smaller ones. They don’t it use often. The owner of the mysterious hand has shut every possible blind. The door closes with an ominous click. “What_now?” _

“Will you just—Keep it _down!” _

The voice is Esposito’s. The hand is Esposito’s, and it still has him by the shirtfront. The two of them stand there, closer than is comfortable for either of them, for a moment that’s too long for both of them.

“Sorry, man,” Esposito mumbles. He releases his death grip and steps as far back as he can. It’s not far, given the table and chairs that are clearly meant for a larger space.

“What that the hell was that about?” Castle swipes at his rumpled shirtfront and takes his own giant step backward. “I’ve already got mobsters pulling knives on me, I don’t need you giving me a heart attack.”

“Need to ask you something.” Esposito’s eyes dart around the room. “But you gotta keep it to yourself.”

“Yeah.” It’s reflex agreement more than anything. Esposito’s body language could generously be described as twitchy. Anything but assent seems ill-advised. “Sure. Of course.”

Esposito’s jaw works overtime for another long, uncomfortable moment. He looks like he’d give anything for enough room to pace, but he settles for banging the side of his fist idly into the cinderblock wall.

“What do you do when it’s time to meet the parents?” he blurts at last.

“Parents?” Castle repeats blankly. “Whose parents?”

“Lanie’s,” he hisses. “They’re in town. They’re coming to meet me. She just sprang this on me, like, a minute ago.” He shoots Castle an urgent, sidelong look. “I gotta know how to act. Make a good impression.” 

“And you’re asking me—_me_—for advice?” He’d like to strut about it—make the good Detective squirm a little for all the times he and Ryan have picked on, pranked, and put him down—but he’s too consumed by flashbacks. “Need I remind you that when Beckett and I did this, we wound up on the run and both ended up getting taken hostage—_separately_taken hostage? And that was_after_our folks almost murdered each other.”

“But you recovered!” Esposito’s hand shoots out. He takes an iron-fingered hold of Castle’s biceps. The hard glitter of real desperation lights his eyes. “You got engaged. You got—“

“Esposito, if you’re not in here, I swear to God—” Beckett bangs the door hard into Esposito’s elbow. It breaks his most recent death grip. He jumps backward, looking guilty. “What the hell are you two doing in here? Castle, aren’t you supposed to be down at the Tombs with Christopher Carlucci?”

“Lanie’s parents are in town!” Castle blurts. He points a finger at Esposito. “They’re coming to meet him. He doesn’t know what to do.”

Esposito shoots him a glare that says he has some new and definite ideas about what to do, starting with murder in a windowless precinct work room.

“Lanie’s parents?” Beckett’s jaw drops before Esposito can get a jump on his plans for the immediate future. “They think you’re engaged!”

“They_what?” _

“She_told _you?”

Their astonished cries overlap and amplify each other. There’s a sudden, ominous silence in the bullpen immediately outside the stupid, tiny room.

“Will you guys just—” Beckett crams herself the rest of the way in and pushes the door shut behind her. “Do you want the whole bullpen to hear?”

“Why would Lanie tell her parents she was engaged to _him?”_Castle jerks a thumb toward Esposito. That and his stage whisper get him two deadly glares for the price of one. “And why wouldn’t_you_tell_me?”_

“Why would I tell _you_of all people?” Beckett hisses back. He holds up his left hand, his wedding ring glinting of what little light there is. She waves off the gesture and plants a fist on her hip. “Castle. Do you really want to know something Lanie doesn’t want you to know?”

“Yes!” He thinks about it. “Except no. Except yes. Of course I want to know! But I see your point. So, no. But now I know!” 

“Yo!” Esposito snaps. “How ‘bout we focus on your boy here? Lanie’s gonna kill me if I screw this up!”

Castle regards him for a silent moment. The man is a wreck. “Who should we give your stuff to?”

“Javi, you’re going to be fine.” The back of Beckett’s hand smacks into Castle’s chest. “You and Lanie …” She falters. “You really like Lanie. And she really likes you. So … just remember that.”

“Like her? She _likes _me?” Sweat glistens on his forehead. They can feel heat radiating off his body in the stifling space. “We’re supposed to be _engaged. _The hell do I know about being engaged?”

“Well, in my experience … ” Castle tips his head to the side, considering. “In my experience, you propose, your fiancée moves to another city, you don’t see her for two months, and there’s a lot of FaceTime sex. Though not as much FaceTime sex as you’d like.”

_“Castle!” _Beckett moves to smack him again, but he flinches back.

“What, you want to tell your side of the story?” Even the glancing blow hurts. He rubs at the spot on his chest he knows will be sore for days. “Because I feel like there’s not another side to that story.” 

“Man, I did not need to know that!” Esposito looks like he might be sick. The buzz of his phone splits the work room’s stale air, and he really looks like he might be sick. He lifts the glowing screen with the air of a man mounting the scaffold. “They’re on their way.” His voice breaks. “What am I gonna do?”

“Your best.” Beckett claps him on the shoulder. “Just do your best.”

She wrenches the door handle open and propels Esposito back out into the bullpen. He clings to the doorframe and turns back to them.

“My best?” He blinks, glassy-eyed in the half light. He digs deep for his usual bravado. “Hell yeah. My best is _good, _right?” The trembling question mark spoils the effect, but he squares his shoulders and saunters off.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Castle finds her hand and clutches it tight.

“So dead.” She clutches his right back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is a bit of a cheat and a bit of a departure. I don’t think this can fit into the chronology of the episode (and I’ve been trying to keep to that), but I already wrote a couple of Castle Is Sad stories after this episode (because I was sad that Castle was sad). Also, I love Cyber Rita and wanted to immortalize her sparkling dialogue.


	11. Conjunction—Castle, P.I. (7 x 11)

> _“When it came to me, lady justice had different plans.”  
—Richard Castle, Castle P.I. (7 x11)_

* * *

Shana Baker’s murder should be the case that has them finding their feet in this new, not exactly ideal reality. And it is, in some ways. He’s up and dressed. He kisses her with a cheerful _Bye, Honey,_and if it’s not entirely sincere, there’s the spark of life—the spark of hope—that’s been missing lately.

And then he shows up at her damned crime scene, waving his shiny new P.I.’s license around. _Surprise! _

But, honestly, that’s all … part of the feet finding, as it turns out. She scrambles to play defense about it at first. She didn’t know, absolutely not, she tells Esposito, she tells Gates, she tells everyone at the precinct who asks and who hasn’t asked. She says, indignantly, that he should have told her, because, _Hello! Married! _And inside her head, inside her heart, she thinks she should have known, should have noticed, should have been able to see this coming, because he’s not one to idly mourn, and she knows that. But she didn’t know, she didn’t see, so now she plays defense. That’s how it goes when it’s still early days in the new reality.

But then it’s not early days, and she goes on offense. Oh boy, does she go on offense, because he will not beat her at this. And he goes on offense, because he’s got something to prove to himself, to her, to the world, and that leads to some unexpected places, feet-finding wise. Unexpected, but not at all unwelcome, because …_unfff, _what’s the sound of toes curling?

That part is all well and good. That part is significantly _better _than well and good, and eventually she figures it out. It kind of has nothing to do with finding their feet with one another—or at least not much to do with it. That’s what she realizes as the case wears on. This part, at least, is not so much about competition or the blazing pyrotechnics that come with them both playing offense. It’s mostly about the sudden, toe-curling contrast, because they’ve been sad.

It’s been the holidays, and it’s been January. They haven’t had time to, haven’t wanted to, haven’t needed to really think about what this enormous shift in their lives will look like. They’ve been telling each other, in passing, that it’ll be fine, it’ll be good, they’ll figure it out.

And not at all in passing, they’ve both been—they’ve stupidly, separately been—dreading the fact that the holidays will end. January will pass, and things will eventually have to shake back out into the usual routine. Except the routine won’t be usual. She’ll be out there doing the work and he won’t, and it’s a loss. An enormous loss. They’ve been sad about that, and now they’re … less sad, because they’re finding their feet. 

With the sad out of the way, or at least with the clouds lifting, they’re both remembering—realizing all over again—that they’re partners. Of course he misses her the second their lips part—_Bye, Honey_—and of course she misses him. They way they fall on each other is a testament to that. The way they tear at one another’s clothes as though it’s been days, weeks, months instead of a few hours speaks to the fact that they miss one another, body and soul, but they miss the work, too.

_He _misses the work itself and the meaning he finds in it. He misses the sense of purpose and the satisfaction of turning his mind and heart and skills to that. And she misses having a purpose beyond the work. She misses the balance he brings to the unbroken strings of days going full out on the case. She misses him by her side, pulling her away from long, longer, longest nights.

She misses the stupid jokes that let her catch her breath in between terrible moments. She misses turning to him, bleary-eyed and dead-ended to hear another voice, another perspective, another mind that works in ways hers doesn’t, can’t, won’t. She misses the way he cares for her, even in the midst of work—the way they care for each other with candy dishes and take out and coffee, with brisk walks around the block and stolen moments fumbling at each other’s bodies in the front seat of her unmarked, in every decently isolated place in the precinct.

They miss each other, full circle, full stop. 

That’s something like the final piece—the final step in finding their feet. She stands up for him. Shana Baker’s case well and truly blurs he lines between what she’s allowed to do, what she wants to do, and what she ought to do. That’s how she finds out what she_will_do, because she might buy expensive wine and enforce the law now, but she’s still the rebellious girl with the leather jacket, too. No one can remind her of that like he can, so she stands up for him. She stands up for them.

She’s still his partner, and she doesn’t have to say _can’t. _


	12. Why We Fight—Private Eye Caramba! (7 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His mind is too busy for sleep, even after a couple glasses of wine and time well spent ensuring that his second customer of the day is well and truly satisfied. It’s too alive with smoldering lines of dialogue from the lips of Sofia Del Cordova, with Ronnie the lobby guy’s hunched demeanor and low-key greed, with Pam the restroom attendant’s sharp eye for personality, relationships, intentions.

> _“I thought you were a writer. What happened?”  
—Ronnie, Private Eye Caramba! (7 x 12) _

* * *

His mind is too busy for sleep, even after a couple glasses of wine and time well spent ensuring that his second customer of the day is well and truly satisfied. It’s too alive with smoldering lines of dialogue from the lips of Sofia Del Cordova, with Ronnie the lobby guy’s hunched demeanor and low-key greed, with Pam the restroom attendant’s sharp eye for personality, relationships, intentions.

He rests a palm on her spine, feeling the smooth, steady breath between her shoulder blades, then slips from the bed into his study. His hands reach instinctively for his laptop, but he hesitates. He pushes it aside in favor of a fountain pen and a good pad of paper. He switches on the neglected desk lamp, angling the shade so the spill of light licks out over the desk. He sits, nib poised over the elegant, lined sheet, and waits to see how this will shake out—how the plot points and character quirks will make their way out into the world.

Nothing comes at first. He doesn’t expect that. It’s a mystery writer’s gold mine, or it will be once he strips away the tedium and less than glamorous aspects, and he wonders what his damned hand is waiting for.

He taps the expensive nib at the upper left of the first line. He lets the weight of the pen carry the barrel around the back of his thumb, then catches it on the palm side. He fidgets and sketches and doodles, and even though there’s still a clamor of things about the case he wants to capture before they fade, nothing he thought he was thinking about will come.

He shifts gears. He takes his eye off the page and lets it fall where it will, somewhere in the middle distance. He lets it drag down the glass wall to the outside world and sweep along the narrow seam of deeper shadow at the bottom of the door to the bedroom. He lets himself study the back of his own hand without intention until the pen seems to move of its own volition. 

_Pink bunny._

That comes out first. He doesn’t know what it means. He lets himself not know. He moves the pen, or the pen moves itself, and the word Locket comes out. Ring. Her mother’s ring, underscored several times, circled reverently. He jumps back and forth in the timeline—_Grocery Bag, Drop Key, Blue Butterfly, Broken Keychain_. By the time _Brag Book _makes its way out of his pen, he has an idea about the idea.

He’s thinking about evidence, objects, things, and the way people connect to them. He’s thinking about the way they link people to one another and how they’re infused with meaning, with motive, with significance that shifts in different kinds of light. He adds _Rhinestone _to his haphazard cloud of words, then with the fond memory of its balance in his hand, _Magnifying Glass _nearby.

He gets a little scene out of that. The sound of the crystal tumbling on the scarred surface of the wooden desk as it comes loose from the purse, sudden intuition, confirmation, insight, followed hard on by the appearance of his _femme fatale. _He gets his Maltese Falcon moment down on paper, everything right up to the bait and switch—the worthless purse and the key to the dreams of three different women, the nightmare of their killer.

He gets the mechanics of it down and one or two quick-stroke emotional beats, but for all its familiarity, he doesn’t quite understand it. He doesn’t quite grasp where the moment will go or why it matters.

“You’re not out here being your own muse, are you?” She’s a heart-stopping silhouette in the bedroom doorway, right on cue.

“Definitely not.” He holds out a hand to her and the words are like punctuation dropping in to make sense of the scattered mess he’s committed to the page. “You are the once and future muse.”

“Damn straight,” she says smugly as she drops into his lap. She shifts the weight of their bodies to swing the chair around. She steals a peek at the desk. “Pen and paper. Old school.”

He shrugs, tracing the continuation of an idea down the bare expanse of her thigh with busy fingers. “It’s what was working tonight.”

“Writing working?” She rests her head on his shoulder. She lands a sloppy kiss on the underside of his chin and settles in for the story, whichever one he wants to tell.

“Yes and no,” he says. The _no_is a surprise and part of the solution to the problem of the page. He’s figuring out in real time which story it is that he intends to tell. “I was just thinking through the case.”

“Your first case.” She lands a proud, sloppy kiss on the underside of his chin.

“My first,” he echoes, though he’s not thinking of it that way tonight. Not exactly. “I thought I was just looking for a purse, and then I thought I was looking for a really expensive purse, and then it was a fake and …” He trails off, then starts up again, the words coming in a bashful rush. “I think I did good today.”

He feels his cheek grow hot, and he’s glad of the cool press of her skin against it. He’s glad for the cover of darkness.

“Of course you did good,” she tells him with a sleepy laugh. “You do the job, you do good. That’s how it goes on the best days.”

“That’s how it goes.” He peers over the top of her head to the mess of thoughts spilled out on the page. He sees objects—_things_—fixed there and the meaning they make holding everything together. He understands better what he wants to do with the P.I. business and why. He understands that it’s what he’s done alongside her for years. “You’d think I’d know that by now.”


	13. Veneer—I, Witness (7 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s doing better than she would have expected in the wake of Eva Whitfield. There’s the occasional thousand-yard stare, and he’s a bit more acerbic than usual—quicker with some jaded bit of skepticism—when she tells him edited tales from the precinct. But on the whole, he seems okay.

> _“It’s too clean.”   
—Richard Castle, I, Witness (7 x 13) _

* * *

He’s doing better than she would have expected in the wake of Eva Whitfield. There’s the occasional thousand-yard stare, and he’s a bit more acerbic than usual—quicker with some jaded bit of skepticism—when she tells him edited tales from the precinct. But on the whole, he seems okay. 

As far as the PI business goes, he’s throttled back a little, at least in terms of promotion and hustling for clients, but he’s made no move to torch the whole endeavor.

“Not making any hasty decisions,” he tells her, taking care to meet her eyes when he does. He holds her gaze for a beat, then waggles his eyebrows. “Of course, it would be an even more well-considered decision if I … _napped _on it again.”

So they nap on it, and he’s as playful and enthusiastic as ever. They sleep on it, and he even sleeps through the night, most of the time. And when he doesn’t, he owns up to it—the fact that he’s not sleeping and the reason why.

“Suspense, not surprise.” He looks chagrined, every time.

“Nobody’s Hitchcock here.” That’s her line, and she delivers it with a tug on his ear, a kiss slanted across his forehead in passing, a roll of her eyes, as that particular instance calls for.

“The tells were there. I just didn’t see them.” And that’s his line. Call and response when the Eva of it all gets to him.

“Do you need to see them?” she asks one morning when he’s particularly hollow-eyed, particularly haunted. “Will it help if you go over it until you find them?”

“Of course not,” he says instantly. He shakes his head at himself. “I’m being silly.”

He gives her an apologetic smile, but that’s not what she meant. It was a question—a real question about what he needs—not an admonition. But he’s already off making coffee, he’s off making breakfast, he’s asking what she’d like him to make for dinner. He’s spun them right off that conversational trajectory before she can’t tell him it was a real question.

And so they go on, and he’s doing better than she would have expected. At least it seems that way, but there’s something itchy at the back of her mind about it, something that tips the balance until she’s the one who’s not doing as well as she should be. She’s the one who’s suddenly prone to the thousand-yard stare and not being able to sleep on it.

“What’s up?” he asks.

They’ve crossed middle-of-the-night paths, or maybe very-beginning-of-the-morning paths. She thinks about trying to sell the latter—telling him she’s just up early to get in an extended run or check on some things she’d set in motion on her case the night before. She thinks about it, then remembers that he’s been looking her in the eye. He’s been owning up as best he can this whole time, and she owes him the same.

“She was pretty,” she says. “Eva.”

She hauls herself out of the chair and the extensive pile of blankets she’s accumulated in the hours she’s been up mulling over whatever this is. She crosses to the bookshelf and laughs to herself a little at how quickly she find what she’s looking for—how easy it is because she hasn’t quite squared the spines.

“Eva.” His throat sounds tight. He’s trailed after her and she can see the outline of his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows hard. “What’s this about?”

“Her, I guess.” She shrugs and lets the Faircroft Prep yearbook fall open on top of the waist-high shelf. She has to flip a page or two back, but the spine holds the recent memory of the heel of her hand and the weight of her gaze as she pored over the page. “You were friends.” She touches a finger to the cloud of spiral-curled hair around the young woman’s face. “Were you good friends?”

He peers over her shoulder. She feels him startle a bit—do a double-take—at how unfamiliar the face is to hm.

“No,” he says quietly. “Not good friends.”

It sounds like a confession, and that’s not what she meant, either. She’s about to snap at him. She’s about to lash out, even though it’s herself she’s frustrated with, but he flips to another section.

“She used to cheat off me.” It’s a crowded, more free form page. He points to a small picture of two kids in goggles and lab aprons with a bunsen burner between them. His hair has a little bit of a Chia Pet vibe and his grin is wide and a little bit dorky. He skips over himself, though. His finger lands on Eva. “AP Chem. She brought that up first thing. Maybe that was the tell.” 

“Pretty obvious,” she nods, mock stone-faced. “It’s a direct line from grubbing for a four on AP exams to a byzantine plot to frame your husband for murder.”

“One, you wound me. _I _got a five on that exam.” He snaps the yearbook closed and sets it aside. “Two, is there something I should know about your point-grubbing tendencies?”

His hands land on her hips. He turns her toward him in the weak, early morning light. He’s smiling. He’s playful and doing better than she would have expected.

“It doesn’t matter if you were good friends or not,” she blurts. She reaches up and skims her fingers through his hair. Even tousled with sleep, it’s well-cut and manageable. The bleary-eyed smile he gives her is careful and charming and it worries her. The distance from the boy on the page to this man, here and now, seems like it’s grown by leaps and bounds since Eva, and it worries her. “It’s okay … you don’t have to be so okay, even if you weren’t good friends.”

“So okay?” The question is like a test balloon. It’s balanced on the edge between teasing her and asking—really asking what it is she’s asking. “Kate, I _am_okay,” he says gently, but the yearbook has a magnetic pull. His gaze falls on it, and he amends the claim. “I’m mostly okay.” 

“Okay.” She rolls her eyes at herself, at the overburden of okays. “Just … I know I told you that you can’t let cases get under your skin.”

The words start to pile up on her, and she sees him, ready to jump in. Ready to show how okay he is, so she stops him with a thumb to his lips. She waits for him to nod, to breathe, to quiet.

“That’s true,” she tells him with a sharp look. “You can’t let them eat you alive. But she was your friend. It’s not a flaw for this one to hurt a little longer.”

He nods again. He reaches up and slides his fingers between hers. He presses their two hands to the center of his chest and swallows hard. He breathes through it.

“Oh, good,” he says. “That’s good.” In the weak, early morning light, he smiles at her. “Because it still hurts.”


	14. Chatter—Reckoning (7 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is really not the time to remind her that teleportation is the only superpower worth entertaining. Arguably, there is no time to try to remind her of that. She’s ludicrously obstinate in her allegiance to flight, and she gets snippy about it to say the least. But now is super, extra not the time, given that they are Mad Maxing their way from Manhattan to White Plains at superhuman speeds. Plus, he has to admit, there’s an argument for flight in this scenario. There’s just a much stronger one for teleportation. As usual. But this isn’t the time.

> _“There’s a timeline problem.”   
—Tory Ellis, Resurrection (7 x 14)_

* * *

This is really not the time to remind her that teleportation is the only superpower worth entertaining. Arguably, there is no time to try to remind her of that. She’s ludicrously obstinate in her allegiance to flight, and she gets snippy about it to say the least. But now is super, extra not the time, given that they are Mad Maxing their way from Manhattan to White Plains at superhuman speeds. Plus, he has to admit, there’s an argument for flight in this scenario. There’s just a much stronger one for teleportation. As usual. But this isn’t the time.

“What?” she says sharply. She gives him a microsecond glare, then re-fixes her attention on the maddeningly congested road.

“What?” He startles and rewinds the tape in his head of the last few seconds. Snorting. Damn. He’d snorted to himself. “Oh. Nothing.” He shrugs and hopes for the best. “Just thinking dumb things, because …”

“Because.” Her echo carries the weight of the world with it. Traffic roars in both directions outside the silence of the car, not nearly loud enough to drown out everything that slithers between the letters of that _because. _“Tell me dumb things.” She spares him a millisecond glare this time, a glance long enough that he can see the desperation in it. He can match it with the plea threading through her voice like fresh, angry stitches holding together broken skin. “I can’t stop thinking about Susan Watts.”

“Susan Watts.” He reaches across the center console to lay his hand briefly on her thigh. “I know.” 

He does know. Susan Watts lurks beneath all the silly, self-preserving chatter of his brain— superpowers and the memory of every time he’s drawn her into that argument. Every time he’s roped in Ryan and Esposito and Lanie—even her _dad _once.

Beneath all that, the story of Susan Watts’ last moments on Earth writes and rewrites itself. In one version, she realizes the monster she’s fallen in with and bides her time, waiting to escape. In another, she realizes there’s no moment that will make a difference, so she runs. In another, she never realizes. She thinks it’s a game until it’s far too late.

In some versions, the ending is like all the others before. In others, it’s like Pam Hodges, like Daniel Santos—a new breed of victims, literally if he’s right. In one or two or ten, her last moments are nothing like anything that came before.

The story writes itself. It rewrites itself.

“Castle.” She snaps him out of his grim reverie. She changes lanes. She accelerates and passes someone who’s been driving like an absolute maniac, but not enough of one. She slots the car back into the right-hand lane. “Dumb things. Tell me.”

_Teleportation: An Irrefutable Defense. _

That’s what’s just on on the verge of tumbling out when his brain changes lanes. It shifts over and settles into another storyline that’s always writing—always rewriting—itself, no matter what else might be on his mind. 

“Do you remember the first time we made this drive together?” A smile tugs at his lips. It has its work cut out for it, given the grim mission they’re on, but it tugs insistently. “White Plains, twice, on the same case.”

“Melanie Cavanaugh,” she says instantly. Not so instantly, she adds, “Ben Davidson.”

The smile loses the battle then. Ben Davidson, murderer of murderers, a father who carved out his own justice for his daughter, is still doing time, in part because he wanted desperately to impress her in those days. In part because he couldn’t leave well enough alone. His brain kept writing and rewriting the story. It still does. He thinks about Julie Davidson and Melanie Cavanaugh’s children, who must be unrecognizable by now—a tween, a full-blown teenager clinging to normalcy by their fingernails.

“Bad dumb thing,” he mumbles at last. “Sorry.” He turns away from her. He turns to look out the passenger-side window at the skeletal branches and winter-brown vegetation rushing by in a blur. 

“You talked.” Her hand crosses the center console this time. It rests briefly on his thigh. “Incessantly. All the way to White Plains, then all the way to New Jersey.”

He remembers. Oh, he remembers vividly how eager he was. The constant barrage of questions and provocative comments. Her maddeningly cool demeanor and the satisfaction—the delight—when she’d crack. She’d yell, she’d smile, she’d land some incredible barb of her own, but hat façade would crack. 

“I was nervous,” he says. The smile makes a comeback. “That’s the day I knew I was going to marry you.”

“Oh, shut _up!”_ The outrageous claim wins a full swivel of her head in his direction. It wins a tiny smile from her, too, though she buries it instantly. She turns it into a scowl. “You did not.”

“Did so,” he shoots back. He studies her profile as traffic slows again and demands her attention. He feels the little moment of levity break like a wave and flow back out to sea. “You told me about your mom.” He shakes his head, still curious—still in wonder—after all these years. “After that second drive, you told me.”

“You were good the second time,” she says after a long enough while that he thinks she won’t say anything at all. “Quiet.”

Of course he was quiet. He’s quiet now, remembering this stretch of road and how it looked in spring, how it looked by night. He’s quiet, remembering that painful conversation outside the neat little house where Melanie Cavanaugh’s parents—her children—had found some kind of peace.

_A cop doesn’t get to decide how the story ends. _

He opens his mouth to protest. To remind her of own words and tell her this time they _will_ get to decide how the story ends. He closes his mouth, though. It’s too much of a longshot. This hope they have is too fragile, and they might yet lose. Amy Barrett might lose, and who knows how many women Tyson may have waiting in the wings. He closes his mouth.

“You didn’t say a word about teleportation the whole way.” She breaks into his thoughts again. She tells him dumb things. “That’s why I told you.”

“Is _not,”_ he practically shouts. She’s caught him out entirely, cheating right out of his own dumb things playbook, and telling such an outrageous lie to boot. He grins as he gives chase down an entirely new branch of the argument. “That is not the story.”

“Oh, but it is.”


	15. Restitution—Reckoning (7 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is in shock. She’s aware of it in the most peculiar ways. She is, it seems to her, perched above herself, looking down at a forty-five degree angle or so as an EMT tries his best to clean the blood from her hands, to clean and bandage the raw places at her wrists, her ankles, to ask about other injuries she might have.

> _“She’s my wife.”  
—Richard Castle, Reckoning (7x 15) _

* * *

She is in shock. She’s aware of it in the most peculiar ways. She is, it seems to her, perched above herself, looking down at a forty-five degree angle or so as an EMT tries his best to clean the blood from her hands, to clean and bandage the raw places at her wrists, her ankles, to ask about other injuries she might have.

_Did they kick, did they punch, did they bite, scratch, crush, can you tell me about any weapons, can you show me on your body? _

She’s looking down the whole time But she is also behind herself, time wise. She’s behind the whole rest of the world that way, and everyone is so patient. They’re so kind about her lagging answers, and their voices, their hands, their gestures are calm and careful, and part of her wants to cry—part of her does cry—and part of her wants to scream that she’s_ fine._ That she’s the one who is patient and calm. _She _is the one who is fucking kind, and she knows that you have to move slowly and speak slowly and go slowly with victims.

Victims.

She is a victim. She is _the _victim. But not the homicide victim. Kelly Neiman is. Jerry Tyson is. She is a different kind of victim, so maybe she doesn’t know anything about this. Maybe she should just be quiet, quiet, quiet, except she wants scream. But that’s the shock talking.

He helps her into the back seat of the squad car. Castle does, and he’s quiet, too. He doesn’t say _Easy now_ or _There you go,_ and she’s so grateful that she’s crying again. He rides with her back there, and she almost asks if it’s too crowded with her other self hovering at a forty-five degree angle or so. She starts to ask and stops.

“What?” he asks gently, but she shakes her head. Lagging behind, she shakes her head. _Nothing. _

She means to steel herself before the elevator doors open on the fourth floor. She means to have her shoulders back and her chin up by the time they reach the bullpen, but it happens more quickly than she ever remembers. There is the _Ding! Going up_ and the doors glide together into a patterned silver expanse, and it’s no time at all before they open like toothless, sideways jaws and there is noise—a thundering roll made, somehow, of sharp, cracking sounds. It comes out of the sea of faces, but not out of them. 

_Applause._ For what? She is a victim, even here.

There is no time to gather herself. There’s too much time, and anyway, he has one arm around her, and the other hovers near her elbow, her wrist, her fingers. He is solid and steady and she is looking out through eyes that don’t quite seem to be hers.

She is clinging to Lanie with leaden arms and thick fingers. She is saying the right words and seeing herself from above. She is seeing the whole scene from the strange angle of shock—revelation, celebration, reunion—it’s all muted, delayed, oblique for her. 

She’s clinging to him next. He lifts her high and holds her tight. He whispers_ I’m back. I’m back, _and she almost tells him she’s the one who was gone. She’s the one who got taken. She almost screams, but—_oh. _That’s right. It’s over. He sets her down and she clings to him still.

“Can I change?” she whispers into his shoulder. The EMT did his best, but there are rusty smears on the cuffs of the grey hoodie. There are rusty half-moons around her fingernails. “I’d like to … change my clothes.”

He says_ Of course._ He says they’ll go right home, but her fingers dig into his shoulders. “No. Now.” The pitch of her voice rises. Her volume rises. “In my locker. Castle, _please.”_

“Sure. Sure,” his says quickly. “Your locker. Of course.” 

He sets her back from him. Arm’s length, and she sees there’s a wide circle of empty space around them. _A blast radius,_she thinks. She laughs and lifts her eyes to share that joke with him, but he’s worried. He looks _so _worried and the version of her that floats above says withering, terrible things in her ear about snapping out of it, getting it together.

“Sorry,” the version of her down here mumbles, late, late, late. “I’m gonna change. Myself. I’m fine.”

She does snap out of it then. For the length of that hallway, she walks fast_—fast—_and she turns at the end to show him that she’s fine. She’s snapped out of it.

He is suspended in motion. Lanie has him by the arm. She is saying calm, careful, things in his ear. She is kind and patient with him. He’s a victim, too. He was scared. He has to have been so scared.

“I’m fine, Castle.” She smiles a little. The version down here, and the version hovering above, the version lagging behind, approves.

It propels her the rest of the way to the locker room, through the process of spinning the protesting dial of the stupid lock with shaking hands. It carries her through dragging the zipper of the hoodie down, peeling her right arm free of the sleeve. Peeling her left arm, and then it’s gone. That sense of … competence. The feeling that she has clawed her way up to the mouth of this thing that has swallowed her whole. It’s gone and she might be screaming. That thin, keening sound bouncing off the tiles might be her.

“I have them.” It’s him. His body surrounds hers. Her knees are up on the rickety locker room bench. He sits behind her, enveloping her. “Kate. They’re here. I have them. Lanie—”

His voice breaks and he’s quiet. He’s quiet for what she thinks might be a long time, but she’s behind again. She’s not fine, and he’s not either. She turns in his arms and her body surrounds his. They’re calm and patient and kind and gentle with one another. It’s kind of ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous, but this is where they are. Above, at a forty-five degree angle or so, behind the timeline by who knows how much. It’s like that for him, too.

He recovers first, though. He kisses the scalding tears from her cheeks and pushes himself backward along the bench. He holds her by the left hand and fumbles in his pocket. 

“Here we go,” he says, but she doesn’t understand until it’s done. Until he’s fastened the wide strap around her wrist. “There.”

He holds her wrist up so the shitty locker room light glints off the face of it.

“My watch.” Her voice sounds blank and flat, but her heart pounds in her chest with fierce relief, joy, hope. “My dad’s watch.”

“Lanie made sure they’d be waiting for you.” There’s the catch in his voice again, and she can almost see it—a black weight pressing down on him. A story. A terrible story about how it is he’s come to have this. She can almost see him shake it off. For her and not for her. For himself, because they have to get past this somehow. They have to snap out of it. “This, too.” He fumbles again in his pocket. He holds something up with one shaking hand. “May I?” He manages a gallant bow from the waist.

She can’t make sense of what it is at first. She can’t and then she can. She takes what feels like the longest, most painful breath of her life. She gives a jerking nod. It’s all she can do as he takes her fingers—calmly, gently, kindly, patiently—and slides the ring home. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Writing through an extra layer of headache. I’ve tried to pull out as much nonsense as I can.


	16. Revamp—The Wrong Stuff (7 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s an absolute ton of writing he should be doing. He is not doing it. He is, instead, rooting through everything.

> _“It’s a sealed, nine-month experiment.”   
—Ed Redley, The Wrong Stuff (7 x 16)_

* * *

There’s an absolute ton of writing he should be doing. He is not doing it. He is, instead, rooting through everything.

It begins in his office. It begins on his laptop, actually, on which he should be writing. But he is not writing, he is rooting—electronically at first, but then he remembers that what he’s looking for might be a little outside the timeframe of just shooting off an email for something like this, and even if it weren’t, what he’s looking for most likely wouldn’t have survived the incident with the laptop he had around then, wherein said laptop had … accidentally met the office wall at high velocity one day when he had a ton of writing he needed to be doing, but couldn’t do.

That’s not the case today. The laptops of the world are safe from wall-meeting accidents, at least. He could totally be doing the writing he should be doing. He just isn’t doing it. He’s rooting through everything, instead.

“Hard copies,” he mutters to himself, and out come the boxes and bins from the lowest levels of the credenza behind the desk. He roots through those, bending awkwardly over in his chair until his back tells him about it and he winds up on the floor until his butt starts telling him about _that._

“Stupid.” He bolts upright and cracks his head on the spun-around arm of the dumb chair. “Stupid, stupid,” he says again as he clambers to his feet, rubbing the sore place over his ear.

He leaves chaos in his wake. The boxes and bins, now empty, look like he abandoned construction on a backyard fort halfway through. He smiles absently at the image, the memory of a few glorious days behind some friend’s brownstone after his parents had gotten a new fridge. He picks his way through the former contents of said boxes and bins, now scattered wide across the floor, and makes his way into the bedroom.

He heads straight for the closet, straight to the back and feels along the wide, high-up shelf. He comes down with an oversized leather folio. He tugs eagerly at the ties, but they’re knotted tight, either with time or his own stupid haste at the time. He’s just thinking about scissors when he finally makes some headway.

The stiff sides flap open in slow motion like a Rip van Winkle yawn and everything almost goes everywhere. He turns and awkwardly rushes to the bed. He opens the folio wide and flips through old, old, old cover art and lobby card–sized posters for books he’s half forgotten that he wrote.

There’s a large-format photo of Alexis in some white gown with a huge pink sash. There are roses all around her and behind her_ I’m trying _smile, she looks absolutely miserable. Adorable, but miserable, and it takes him a minute to remember that it was Gina’s idea, that his split-second of horror when he unwrapped the giant package had gotten him in trouble. There are things and things and things that he probably should have jettisoned a while ago, but the thing he’s rooting around for is nowhere to be found. He leaves the folio and its contents scattered across the bed and moves on.

The size of it should cut down his search area, but he’s annoyed enough now—eager enough—that he roots around indiscriminately. He slides and swings and pulls open cabinets that are too small to accommodate it without folding, and he remembers now that he wouldn’t have folded it. He’s eliminated the only place n the first floor it could be, and the second floor is a dead end. He charges up there anyway.

He strides down the hall, his fingers brushing the door to Alexis’s room, the door to his mother’s. He lands in the guest bedroom with its odd assortment of things that don’t really go anywhere else—a yoga ball and some hand weights, a few boxes full of things from her place that she hasn’t gone through yet. A few boxes full of things he’s been meaning to go through to get rid of to make space.

_Space. _

The word stops him in the act of rolling open the closet’s pocket door with extreme prejudice. It drops him to the edge of the bed. Space. The thing they’ve been desperately in need of for a while now. Except they’re no longer in such desperate need. Or they’re about to be no longer in such desperate need, but that’s what he’s in search of. That’s what the sudden-onset rooting around is about, and there on the edge of the bed, he’s excited and a little melancholy and—

“Castle?”

He hears the shift in her voice from routine to panicked in the space of two syllables. He sees the current state of the first floor with perfect recall, and he’s on his feet. He’s skittering down the hall, calling out. 

“Kate!” He hits the top of the stairs on a slide and almost goes the rest of the way down courtesy of gravity. He recovers at the last second and rapid-fires it down to meet her. “Kate. Hi. This … oh, man.” His perfect recall downplayed the chaos apparently. “This looks bad.”

“Bad. You think?” Those three words are all she lets through her teeth. He watches her breathe through the irritation, the wash of fear she must have felt. He watches her shake it off for his sake. For him. “You’re moping again.”

“I am not _moping,”_ he scoffs. “I have not moped!”

“Castle.” She grabs his elbow and tugs him toward the couch. It’s covered—_covered—_in magazines and coffee table books. It’s covered in random crap that’s usually tucked away somewhere. She stacks a few things on the arm to make a little space and pulls him to sit beside her. “She hasn’t moved out yet. She hasn’t even started seriously looking!”

“I’m not moping.” He dive-bombs her with a kiss that carries with it a complicated truth. He _has _been moping. He hates change and he’s been moping over the fact that his mother will be a few subway stops away soon. He’s been moping over the fact that Alexis is dropping the subtlest of hints that she will not, in fact, be growing old in the loft. He’s been moping despite the fact that he _knows_ all of them living crammed in like this is unsustainable, so he might as well admit it. “I have—occasionally—been moping, but now …” He breathes through something of his own. “I was looking for blueprints.”

She looks around, confused. “Blueprints … for here?”

“For here. Yeah. But not this here.” He looks around, too. He casts his eyes upward. “Before my mother moved in, I had some plans for upstairs drawn up.”

“Man room?” she asks dryly.

“Total man room.” He laughs and shoves books and magazines to the floor. He sprawls the length of the couch and tugs her along. He folds her in close to his body and wonders if she can feel the butterflies beating their wings against his ribs. “But the layout might work for a nursery, too.”

There’s a pause—a_ long_ pause—but he’s calm. He’s eerily calm after something like a full day of frenetic action.

“A nursery, huh?” Her voice is level, but he feels a shiver run through her body. He senses the crackle of excitement tripping along the surface of her skin. “You think so?”

“I think so.” He buries the words against her neck. He buries a humming, electric smile there. “Space themed.”

“Space!” She tips her head back. She casts her eyes upward and laughs. “Works for a boy or a girl, I guess.”

“Obviously.”


	17. Vista—Hong Kong Hustle (7 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He throws himself whole-heartedly into helping her find the next mountain to climb. It’s kind of cute. It’s kind of sweet. It’s kind of annoying. And kind of cute and sweet.

> _“Kate, you don’t need her help. You’re doing just fine.”  
—Richard Castle, Hong Kong Hustle (7 x 17)_

* * *

He throws himself whole-heartedly into helping her find the next mountain to climb. It’s kind of cute. It’s kind of sweet. It’s kind of annoying. And kind of cute and sweet.

“A pickaxe?” She holds up the object in question. Her dazed look skips from it to the elaborately wrapped box she’s just excavated it from to the menacing-looking thing itself. It’s something like number fourteen in a series of “Professional Development Presents” he’s showered her with over the last little while.

“It’s piolet,” he corrects, coming up behind her to slide a hand down her arm to her wrist so he can feel the heft of it along with her. “An ice axe. You haven’t decided what kind of mountain you’re going to climb yet.”

“Metaphorical mountain, Castle.” She laughs and sets it aside as carefully as she can. She shakes her head at his foolishness and turns in his arms. “Probably don’t need need an ice axe, because I’m probably not going to be climbing any actual mountains.”

“But you could.” He wraps her up in a tight hug. He’s practically vibrating with excitement as he buzzes the words directly into her ear. “If you wanted to climb actual mountains, we could make that happen.”

And there it is: Kind of annoying circling all the way back to kind of cute, kind of sweet.

The Sexy Police Captain costume is a little less sweet. It’s obnoxious and hideous and wrong, but it makes her laugh in spite of herself.

“Why, Castle?” She holds it up and away from herself in all its shiny vinyl glory. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “Why is there a Sexy Police Captain costume? No. Back up. How do you even know it’s a Captain?”

“Beckett,” he shakes his head, too, but it’s pitying on his end. He reaches into the box and lifts out a wide leather paddle. He flips it to show the silver studs picking out the letters. “It says so right here.”

She grabs the paddle from him. She can’t argue with his logic, and shortly thereafter, he can’t argue with anything.

A good long while thereafter, he breathlessly says, “See? You’d be a great Captain.”

But the presents, ranging from sweet to ludicrous to kind of fun, are only part of his_ I’m Helping_ onslaught. He researches every precinct, every task force, every opportunity within the NYPD. He rattles off statistics and deadlines and job descriptions. He has a massive spreadsheet that branches out into other agencies.

“Probably not federal?” he gives her a strange look that’s part curious, but treading lightly. It’s part guilty, too, and they actually talk about DC a little. It’s not that they never have, it’s just that it’s different at the remove of more than a year, and he coaxes out of her something more coherent about what she liked and what she didn’t, and she comes out of it with a better understanding of what the next mountain looks like for her.

“So it’s not climb every mountain,” he says, and she is not sure how she wound up married to a man who quotes _The Sound of Music, _absolutely straight faced. “It’s climb the right mountain.”

She’s even less sure how she wound up married to a man whose tendency to quote_ The Sound of Music_ is legitimately helpful. _The right mountain. _It’s stupidly simple and a way of looking at it that’s eluded her so far. She sits down with her list of priorities and strikes out a bunch that are not the right mountain. They’re logical, and well within the typical career path for a cop, but they’re not right for her.

They enter a new phase of _Operation I’m Helping _when she catches him with her laptop. The case is circumstantial at first. The top case is warm when she hasn’t been using it. The zipper on her bag isn’t quite closed, and the most damning piece of evidence: The icons on her desktop are not quite as haphazard as she normally leaves them. They’re not perfectly aligned the way he insists on, mostly because he’ll do anything to procrastinate once he sits down to write, but it’s as if they _were _perfectly aligned, and he tried moving them back.

It goes on like that for days. The presents don’t stop entirely, but they get a little less dramatic. The spreadsheet updates, but it’s more color coding and rearranging, and the announcements about the improvements he’s rolled out get fewer and farther between.

It’s clear his attention has shifted to whatever nefarious plot he needs her laptop for, and she probably should figure that out. She should probably rap his knuckles for being such a damned snoop, but to be honest, she misses the help a little. She feels like she’s slipping backwards again after a bunch of forward momentum.

He notices. She knows he notices, because he seems on the verge of saying something a lot of the time, but he stops himself. She feels a little blue about it, like she pushed back too hard and he thinks she’s really annoyed with him, and she’s not. Other than stubbing her toe on the damned piolet from time to time, she’s mostly not annoyed.

She’s up in the middle of the night with her list when he decides to unveil the next phase. She’s been up a while and he’s making his way out of the bedroom with exaggerated caution.

“I hear you, Castle.” She laughs. “I always hear you.”

“Am I interrupting?” he asks timidly.

“Staring,” she says. “You’re interrupting some very important staring.”

She goes to close the laptop, but he’s on the arm of the chair in a flash. He stays her hand. He lifts it to his lips and presses a kiss to her palm. “Very important. Sorry.”

“You should be.” She rests her head against his thigh, smiling into its warmth.

“As long as I’m being sorry already,” he skims his fingers through her hair, “I have kind of a confession.” He taps the back of the laptop screen.

“You’ve been surfing the hardcore stuff on my work laptop?” She rolls her head to flash him a sly grin. 

“Nope, still Ryan’s.” He presses his thumb to her lips. “But you know that, Detective Naughty.”

“So what do you have to confess, then?” She tugs at him, and he comes willingly, lifting and jostling and making a nuisance of himself until they’re both in the chair, the laptop bridging her thigh and his. “A spreadsheet of exotic dancing opportunities in the tri-state area?”

“No, but now that you mention it, that’s up next.” She elbows him but he dodges. “What? You can’t tell me what mountain I should climb.” His fingers travel over the track pad, navigating folders and folders deep without hesitation. “Not a spreadsheet,” he says with a final click.

“What’s this?” He leans out of the way as she pulls the laptop toward her. “It’s … long.” She holds up a stern palm. “Don’t,” she says absently as she scrolls and scrolls, hardly taking anything in. “Is this new Nikki?” 

“No, it’s old you.” He’s quiet about it. A little nervous and a little shy. “It’s … I know you’re looking forward. Lots of mountains. And this isn’t finished. Not at all. But I think maybe—” He gestures to the screen. She’s taking in more now. Familiar names and events, brief and not-so-brief narratives of the cases they’ve worked together. The cases she’s told him about. “You haven’t been standing still, Kate.”

“I haven’t,” she manages, though her throat feels thick and she can’t really see the screen through the tears crowding in from the corners of her eyes. “I guess I haven’t.”


	18. Benevolent Order—At Close Range (7 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He engineers a night out for Ryan—the four of them plus Jenny. He arranges it, from bribing Alexis to babysit to securing the best banquette at The Old Haunt and making sure the few surrounding tables are kept clear. He orders in a comfort food spread for them all and slips Eddie some cash to keep the piano selections on the Irish side.

> _“That’s a hell of an offer.”  
—Kevin Ryan, At Close Range (7 x 18) _

* * *

He engineers a night out for Ryan—the four of them plus Jenny. He arranges it, from bribing Alexis to babysit to securing the best banquette at The Old Haunt and making sure the few surrounding tables are kept clear. He orders in a comfort food spread for them all and slips Eddie some cash to keep the piano selections on the Irish side.

He wants to _do_ for them—Kevin and Jenny, who really need a break, given everything—but their little precinct family. He wants to take care of them after yet another case that’s hit far too close to home.

The evening starts off … not rocky exactly, but not as convivial as he would have liked. Ryan is preoccupied with Gwen, with Frank, with their kids. Jenny is preoccupied with Kevin, with Sarah Grace, of course, and it’s all just a little somber. But Beckett squeezes his hand under the table. She bumps his shoulder when she thinks no one is looking and murmurs that it’s good. He’s done a good thing.

She tells him, and he believes it before too long. The food does the trick—baked macaroni and roasted chicken. Potatoes and gravy and a few green things that they mostly ignore. They laugh and toast each other with perfectly pulled pints of Guinness and steady nips of good whiskey. They call Alexis and have her hold the phone up to Sarah Grace’s ear so they can sing her a slightly off-kilter lullaby.

It’s all corny as hell, but it’s good. That’s the truth.

Kevin slings his arm around Jenny and she cuddles in to him. The two of them sing snatches of bawdy songs that Eddie has managed to work into his repertoire and they do a little bit of harmony on “Walk, My Love.” Espo rolls his eyes at that. He looks to Beckett for backup, but her eyes a little bright and she leads the smattering of applause, not just from their table, but from Eddie and the seats at the bar that are close enough to hear.

It’s good, and at some point, he knows he’s going to screw it up.

He’d like to blame the whiskey or the steady stream of pints that keep showing up at the table. They’re certainly not innocent, but it’s not like he’s drunk. He’s the host, so he’s been sipping strategically. He’s been loading Annie’s tray up with half-full pints when she clears the table, and sets them up with another round, but even as the heavy mood lifts for everyone else, dark thoughts find their way to him.

He thinks about Kevin and Jenny. He watches them. They’re as nauseatingly cute as ever, but the lines around their eyes and the tired circles are hard to miss. The ordeal with Frank has been hard on both of them, but there’s everyday wear and tear, too

He thinks about all they want for their daughter—for the kids they don’t have yet—and how hard they’re both working at it. He thinks about the things he knows first-hand from raising Alexis, and the things he’s never known—almost certainly never _will _know because of the way fortune has bent for him. He watches them and he worries and he’s this close to ruining this.

He excuses himself while they’re telling some funny story about rushing Sarah Grace to the pediatrician over a mysterious mark on her skin that turned out to be a freckle. They’re laughing over the _That’ll be three hundred dollars _punchline, and he slips out of the booth.

He means to spend a few quality minutes lecturing himself in the men’s room mirror, a few quality minutes shaking off the melancholy Irish of it all, but the minute he turns down the short hallway leading to the restrooms, a hand on his backside has him jumping three feet straight up.

“Kate!” He rotates in mid-air and comes down clinging to her. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“Whiskey reflexes,” she says with a mock stern look. “Not exactly a challenge.”

“Whiskey reflexes. Hmmm.” He sets his hands on her hips and moves to reel her in. “Do you have those, too? Or maybe”—he pauses theatrically to dip her—“whiskey inhibitions?”

He moves in for a sultry kiss, but she gives back something sweet and questioning. “What’s up with you?”

“Up?” He frowns as though he doesn’t get it. “Nothing … yet.” He waggles his eyebrows, but they both know he’s not selling it.

“Castle …” She narrows her eyes and holds up her fingers, threatening a pinch if he doesn’t give.

“I’m worried about them,” he blurts. “About Kevin.”

“I know.” She rests a hand on his shoulder. “I am, too. But the outlook is pretty good for Frank.”

  
He nods. He knows that, but what’s weighing on him is bigger than that. It’s more … comprehensive.

“I just keep thinking about how easy it must have been for Frank to make that first mistake.” he begins slowly. He feels a twinge of regret for loading her up with this, but he watches her watching him and knows it’s better all around to get some of this out of his head before he really does screw up—not just the evening, but something more lasting. He goes on, “A struggling business, kids, and that … man of the house thing.”

He makes a face at that. It’s not quite right, but not quite wrong, either, the particular set of expectations about breadwinning and housekeeping that he only knows about from several degrees of remove, given his own … eclectic experiences.

“And you’re worried Kevin might make a mistake like that.” Her tone is gentle, but it sounds awful out loud. It sounds not quite right, but not quite wrong, either.

“Not—not really.” He gives her a rueful smile. “We’ve got good kids.”

“Kids.” She laughs at that and reaches up for a swift kiss. “What, then?”

“It’s more that I know—” He looks down at his shoes and shakes his head. He cringes and charges ahead, because she’s in interrogation mode, and there’s no point in not charging ahead. Because it’s better to get this out here than there at the table. “All that worry, all that pressure. I could make it go away for them and hardly notice.”

“You could,” she says like she already knows. Like she already knew. “But you can’t.”

“No, I can’t.” It’s like she’s flipped open a safety valve in his chest and the whole complicated mess rushes out. “But it seems stupid that I can’t. It doesn’t seem fair.” 

“It’s not,” she admits. “But I think … I think he knows that if anything really bad came down—” She chews her lip for a second. “I think he knows he could ask for help. It’s not like it was for Frank.” 

“He knows.” He nods to himself. He nods to her and thinks he’ll probably believe them both once this whiskey moment passes. “He knows?”

“There’s family and there’s family.” She threads her fingers together at the nape of his neck. She looks him in the eye. “We’ve got good kids. He knows.”


	19. Butterflies—Habeas Corpse (7 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s in love with him. Obviously she’s in love with him. She’s been in love with him since long before she admitted as much to herself. But it still catches her off guard sometimes. It creeps over her slowly, like a tangling vine seeking the sun. That’s what it’s like for her tonight—she is … pleasantly entangled.

> _“Only audience I care about is you.”   
—Richard Castle, Habeas Corpse (7 x 19)_

* * *

She’s in love with him. Obviously she’s in love with him. She’s_ been _in love with him since long before she admitted as much to herself. But it still catches her off guard sometimes. It creeps over her slowly, like a tangling vine seeking the sun. That’s what it’s like for her tonight—she is … pleasantly entangled.

They’re all over each other after their shower and another successful performance of their “routine.” He’s on his knees with a towel, ostensibly to dry the lower half of her, but he has other plans for that particular geography. She sighs as her knees disappear into parts known. She wraps her arms around his head and pulls him to her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She startles herself with her own abrupt shift in tone. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“Sorry for …?” He’s not startled. It’s almost like he’s been waiting for this—waiting for her to explain herself. It would be kind of annoying if she weren’t so in love with him. It’s a_ little _annoying anyway, how he waits a beat for her to answer the fill-in-the-blank, then shakes off her hold. He takes in her serious posture and the way she’s chewing the corner of her lip. “The song fright?” She nods, ashamed. “So not a big deal.” He stands and drapes the towel playfully atop her head. He draws the two ends under her chin like a babushka and kisses the end of her nose. “It’s not like you left something vital off the dating profile, like_ allergic to garlic_ or _routinely claps on the one and the three.” _

“But you’re my _husband!”_ she protests loud enough for the sound to bounce off the tiles and hit her skin with what feels like a physical slap.

“I _am _your husband.” He grins at the word. She blushes. Neither one of them is used to it. They’re both still prone to say _my partner_—they’re both still prone to grin like idiots at_ my wife, my husband._ “But I am aware—” He stops himself, frowning at the idea of whatever it is he’s about to say. “I’m _kind of_ aware that even married people have boundaries. They don’t tell each other absolutely everything.”

She nods, happy but not happy that he’s so blasé about this. He’s her husband, he’s a writer, he’s an inveterate pesterer and snoop, and there’s something in the way he drops it that’s … disappointing. But she nods. She gives him a sultry look over her shoulder as he holds up the silk robe for her. He gives _her_ a sultry look as she holds up the plush terry robe for him, and that’s the end of that, she guesses.

They make their way into the bedroom. She heads for her dresser, and suddenly he’s behind her in the mirror. He’s pressing his lips together and his face is scrunched up like something’s about to burst out, and then it does.

“I was surprised, though.” He crowds her from behind. He wraps his arms around her waist and half hides his face against her shoulder. “Because—”

“Karaoke,” she jumps in. She understands suddenly and totally the part of this he’s been wondering about. The part he’s been waiting for her to explain. “I love karaoke. I do.” She turns her head to land a clumsy kiss on the side of his face. “I do.”

She feels the huge sigh of relief make its way through his body. She feels it make its way through her own. He lifts his head and she laughs at the sight of it popping up over her shoulder, eager and curious and absolutely hungry to know her. She feels the pleasant, head-over-heels for him sensation draw snug around her. A shiver of anticipation follows in the footsteps of the sigh of relief.

“How is it different?” He meets her eyes in the mirror, but his gaze is a little far off. He’s working on a theory of his own even as he listens, watches, takes stock of everything about her. “Why isn’t it scary?”

“It_ is _scary,” she says slowly. “But it’s … roller coaster scary.” She smiles wide at his serious nod. She wishes she could peek inside his brain. She wishes she could see how he’s making sense of her on the fly. “It’s like white knuckles, pressed-against-the-seat scary, not … falling off a mountain scary.”

“Oooh, that’s perfect. I’m stealing that.” He peppers the side of her neck with kisses. “It’s exactly like that. The way gravity pulls you out of your body to make room for that rush.” She feels his heart pounding against her shoulder blade, even as he grows thoughtful again. “I wish it could always be like that for you.” He nuzzles her ear, half shy, half seductive. “You have a beautiful voice.”

“Kate does.” The words pop out. It’s a defiant assertion and a realization in progress. “Beckett doesn’t.” Her gaze drops to the top of the dresser. She feels the warmth spread from her collar bones all the way up to her hairline. “I get to be Kate when we’re in the Hamptons or when we’re off skiing.”

“Or you get to be Loretta and I get to be Conway.” He coaxes her chin up with his nose like an eager puppy. “‘Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man’ at Diamondback? That was epic.”

“It was.” She laughs and reaches up to tangle her fingers in his hair. She turns to face him. “But I like being Kate most.”

“Me too. I like when you’re Kate.” His voice is heated. His hands are busily working at the sash on her robe, but he stops, looking a little panicked. “I mean, I like when you’re Beckett, too.”

“Oh, I know you like it.” She slaps his hands away. She tugs forcefully at the sash on _his _robe. Desire pushes the languid, lovey-dovey feeling aside for now. “You definitely like that.”


	20. Pot Boiler—Sleeper (7 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s not sure what he expected, and the problem—one of many problems—may be that he hasn’t expected. He’s been very pointedly not expecting for the last nine months, and now what he has is this: A wholly unsatisfying story, told in bits and pieces by people who, given their chosen profession or penance or whatever they want to call it, really ought to be better at it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I’m sorry this is so long and so … terribly project-y and fix-it-y. I really did try to write something else.

> _“Keep me close.”  
—Kate Beckett, Sleeper (7 x 20)_

* * *

He’s not sure what he expected, and the problem—one of many problems—may be that he _hasn’t _expected. He’s been very pointedly not expecting for the last nine months, and now what he has is this: A wholly unsatisfying story, told in bits and pieces by people who, given their chosen profession or penance or whatever they want to call it, really ought to be better at it.

Except maybe they didn’t have to be better at it. That’s a possibility that just about knocks him down. He examines the elements of the story. He picks it apart, and honestly, it’s pathetic—a ticking clock, the one man in all the world who knew the details, the one … high school friend of the one man in all the world who was famous enough to ride along on a world-saving mission?

To call it pulp is an insult to one of his favorite genres, but he can see it. He can see how he’d fall for it. Hell, he has fallen for it. With Sophia, with his father—he’s fallen hook, line, and sinker for the idea that he’s the key to saving the world, and it hardly matters that it seems to have been true this time. Or at least it doesn’t matter enough.

_It haunts me. _

His confession to Burke feels slick and oily and false now. He may have been pointedly not expecting anything, but still, he’s asked himself countless times not just what could have made him leave, but what could have made him leave like that? Abandoning her at the altar—leaving her and his mother and his daughter to think him dead—what could have had him, just hours later, tossing a bag of money into a dumpster, a payoff for destroying the only evidence that might have led her to him?

An immediate, credible threat to them—Kate, Alexis, his mother. It’s the only possibility he’s ever considered, given that timeline. The only one, and it turns his stomach to think that, instead, he must have lapped up this dreck. It makes him reel with self-loathing to realize that they’d have had no time at all to really work on him—to really convince him—so he must have leapt at the idea.

_You missed your wedding. But you also saved tens of thousands of lives._

Hearing a line like that and hopping right on board. Yeah, that sounds like him. It sounds exactly like the grandiose, egotistical, perpetual adolescent he is.

He doesn’t know what to do with it.

_It haunts me. _

It takes on a completely different meaning in the days after all is revealed. After too fucking little is revealed. He tries, once again, to not expect. He becomes a mirror to Alexis, to his mother. They are satisfied. They are relieved, and he’s already put them through so much. He’s shut them out. He’s kept _them_ from expecting anything—any kind of resolution—so he smiles back now. With them, he walks in the world as if a weight has been lifted.

With Ryan and Esposito, he plays the role. _Sorry, boys. Need to know. _He winks theatrically and struts. He wishes—and he knows it’s messed up—that Esposito weren’t satisfied at last by two and a half bodies and this stupid, byzantine plot. He wishes there were someone who saw him for what he is.

It’s hardest with Kate. Of course it is. His worst case scenario all along—what he thought was his worst case scenario—has been that he did something unspeakable. He sees now, though, that the idea is nothing but a soft landing he’d prepared for himself. He thinks about Douglas Stevens. 

_I didn’t think you had that side to you. _

_Well, when it comes to the people I love, I do. _

He thinks about what he would have done to Bracken or Vulcan Simmons without blinking, the way he calmly, methodically set a trap for Jerry Tyson that was only ever going to end one way. He hasn’t missed a moment’s sleep over any of that.

To protect them, to come back to them, he’d have done anything and lived with it. There is no part of himself—his soul—he would not have sacrificed. But it had nothing to do with them, except it had everything to do with them. He left them in the blink of an eye because some shadowy figures dragged him out of a burning car and told him only he could save the world. 

She believes it. Kate does, and he doesn’t know how to say that it doesn’t matter that it seems to have been true. He doesn’t know how to cope with this … crisis of character except to keep it to himself. He won’t make her a victim all over again, so he keeps it to himself.

He takes a sharp turn into the everyday, into the domestic. He breaks off from cases to cook elaborate meals that he keeps warm for her. He sets the table or a pair of places at the breakfast bar—with linens and candles and fresh-cut flowers—no matter what time she gets home. He puts her to bed and carries it in on a tray when it’s so late that she’s ready to drop and he cajoles her into a few bites before her eyes close on her.

He does laundry and plans date nights. He makes romantic gestures by the dozen. He devotes himself to their lives, day in, day out, and ultimately, he agonizes over the fact that it’s getting better. But it is. It does get better. The dreams fade. He sleeps … fine. Not great, but no worse than usual. He forgets for hours at a time that doesn’t deserve this life.

He starts writing again. He’s behind, of course. He’s always behind this time of year, and a glimpse of a Russian assassin for hire—one who was apparently bad enough at his job to get caught on camera—means it’s worse than usual. This wholly unsatisfying story makes it worse than usual, and still, it’s getting better.

His fingers itch. His brain itches, and he opens his neglected working document. He scans through it. He’s at the end—at the point where he left off—and it all rolls suddenly over him. It boils up and out, black and oily and slick. It blots out the world so completely that he cries out when she slides the plate in front of him. He jerks back and almost goes over in the desk chair.

There’s a smile frozen on her face. He watches it die. “Castle, what?”

“I killed him,” he says flatly. “Rook.”

“What?” The smile rises again, a brief flicker of it. She thinks he’s joking. “What do you mean you killed him?”

“The kidnapping. It wasn’t one.” He sees his own flash of teeth as though he’s standing behind her, looming over the scene. “He went—he left her. He bought some dumb fucking story and left her. I killed him.”

“You can’t kill him,” she says simply. She pushes the dinner plate all the way across the desk, navigating around the laptop. She balances on the edge of the desk, facing him. “You shouldn’t kill him.”

“I don’t know what else to do.” His head drops into his hands. “I don’t know.”

“Why won’t you talk to me about it?” She keeps her voice carefully neutral. She lets the silence stretch out. He feels her fingers sift lightly through his hair. “I’m not used to waiting for you to talk about … anything.”

A wet, ugly laugh rises up from the depths of him. “I don’t know what to say, either.”

“What’s so bad about it?” She traces the curving path of his ear, the sweep of his eyebrow. “Why is it so bad for you?”

_It’s a terrible story_ he wants to shout. He wants to rant and rave and throw things, but he won’t. He’s done with dramatics. He leans into her touch. He lifts his head and looks up at her.

“Why would I go?” he asks. “Just like that. Why would I believe them?”

She doesn’t answer right away. She doesn’t rush into an answer, unconsidered.

“Maybe it wasn’t ‘them’.” She looks at a point somewhere behind him, somewhere slightly above his head, like there’s a murder board there. “Maybe it was him. Your friend.”

“Friend.” he practically spits the word. It’s kind of dramatic. “He wasn’t—”

“He was, though.” She tugs his chin up, none too gently. “You knew him as a kid. You knew him well enough, years later, to know that he worked in a foreign country’s intelligence agency. You _knew_ him, Castle.” A flicker of sadness crosses her face. A flicker of anger for him—on his behalf. “They made you forget. You don’t even know how much.”

“Maybe. Maybe if they’d … knocked me out and threw me on a plane.” The words well up in him. It’s almost a panic, like he has to keep ahead of anything that might draw him again—anything that might assuage the guilt he feels. The guilt he deserves to feel. “Maybe if they’d locked me up and worked on me till I gave in, but its was hours, Kate—hours later—”

“We knew you weren’t dead.” Her voice drops low. She stares down at her lap. “Vinny Cardano? Castle don’t you think …” She gathers herself with a shaking breath. With a hard swallow. “Don’t you think that whoever ‘they’ are, they had a better way of making a car disappear than you—you, personally going to that dumpster—paying off a mobster we both knew? Haven’t you at least considered the possibility that you were trying to leave me whatever breadcrumbs you could?”

“No,” he says, something like a thousand years later. She’s reaching. She has to be reaching, but he wants so badly to believe there’s truth to it. “No, I hadn’t thought of that.” 

“Yeah, well maybe if you’d talk to me once in a while—”

“I’m sorry.” He pulls her to him and rises to meet her at once. It shoves the laptop aside, rotating the whole thing ninety degrees. The dinner plate sails over the edge of the desk. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop,” she says fiercely. “Can’t we just stop being sorry?”

“Not right away?” He presses his cheek into the crook of her shoulder. He’s ashamed and frustrated. He’s still fucking _haunted_ by the stupid story and he’s not at all sure this isn’t just her enduring kindness. He catches sight of the laptop screen, the cursor blinking in the middle of Jameson Rook’s gruesome death. “I’m working on it. I’ll work on something better than sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hesitated in posting this one, and thought about not putting it up here, but that seems silly, given the nature of the project.


	21. Penelope—In Plane Sight (7 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s unbelievable the way the world goes on after the plane finally lands. After she knows they’re safely, literally on the ground, then in a car speeding along on the wrong side of the road, everything still goes on, even though she feels absolutely ready to drop.

> _“I thought you said you didn’t want to be attached at the hip?”  
—Richard Castle, In Plane Sight (7 x 21) _

* * *

It’s unbelievable the way the world goes on after the plane finally lands. After she knows they’re safely, literally on the ground, then in a car speeding along on the wrong side of the road, everything still goes on, even though she feels absolutely ready to drop.

She can’t though. She can’t give in to the sudden, intense pull of gravity and lay her head on her desk or burrow into the highly suspect cushions of the break room couch, because there’s paperwork to do. There’s all of the things she put on hold for hours while she waited for the plane carrying her heart to fall from the sky.

She gets through it, though. She weathers the hearty smiles and back slaps and nods vigorously as people tell her she must be so relieved. _So relieved,_ she says and gets back to work, to the things keeping her from home and the t-shirt of his she curls up in when he’s gone.

She watches the clock incredulously. It drags its hands in maddening fashion, then rushes forward, seemingly out of the blue. She strains to open her eyes wide enough to do the math._ New York plus five,_ she murmurs to herself, and there’s a moment when it just makes no sense. There’s a moment when she’s shaking all over and tears are pricking her eyes, and she just can’t figure it out.

But she does figure it out—the math, the timing—and she finishes what needs finishing. She dots her last _i_ and crosses her last_ t,_ and she is out of there. She is setting the land-speed record for the distance between the precinct and the loft. She is home. She has her key in the lock and something that’s been nagging at the back of her mind for hours now is suddenly launched forward.

“Martha!” She’s missing time. She is outside the door, and then she is in. She is enfolded in Martha’s crazily patterned, vibrantly colored arms. She is surrounded by the scent of her, powder and perfume and a hint of the sachet she keeps in her chest of drawers.

“Katherine, what you must have gone through!” she exclaims as they cling to one another. “The absolute agony!”

“You know,” Kate says, over and over. It’s all she can muster because somewhere in the missing time there was the possibility that his mother _didn’t _know—hadn’t known any of it—and she was going to have to recount it all, start to finish. But she doesn’t have to. Martha knows. 

“Yes, yes. Oh, darling, yes. I know all about it.” She’s almost laughing. She’s almost at the same edge of exhausted hysteria that Kate is. They sink to the couch together, and she’s so grateful to not be alone in it. “They called me on the—oh, the video call. It was all over by then, and to see their faces! And now I just—well I just feel like I have to live through half a dozen heart attacks in a row to catch up with where you must be.” She holds Kate’s hands tight in her own.

“I told him to go.” It’s another nagging thing that bursts abruptly out into the world. “He thought—because of the time he was gone. He tossed the invitation without even telling anyone about it, and when I found it, I told him—” She’s a wreck, remembering how they’d bickered. How he’d said she was trying to get rid of him, and half meant it. “I told him to go, and Martha, if something had happened—”

“But it _didn’t.” _Martha snaps instantly back to herself. She takes Kate by the shoulders and looks at her dead on. “Nothing happened to them, and you were right to tell him to go.” She tilts her head, daring Kate to interrupt. “Richard needs to step back into his own life. He needs to move on from the time he missed.”

“I know,” Kate says quietly, and she does know, but there’s nothing quite like hearing it from a force of nature—from Martha, whose heart might’ve fallen from the sky today, too. But it didn’t. _It didn’t._ “He knows, too.” 

“Well, then. If I know Richard, he’ll have already worked this…” She gestures, conjuring up the word. “This escapade into his speech.”

“His speech!” Kate casts a panicked look at her watch. She can’t make sense of the numbers. She can’t make sense of the math. “Martha what time … what time is it in London? I was supposed to—he was going to call, or I was going to—” 

There’s a chirping sound from the bag that sits, forgotten, just inside the door. She pops to her feet and makes a dive for it—a dive for the iPad inside. She flips it open and somehow remembers how to accept the request. His face appears, pixelated, then resolving into familiar features.

“Hey sexy, wanna have some fun?” He freezes mid–eyebrow waggle as he spies Martha laughing somewhere over her shoulder. “Mother. Hi. Hello.”

“Hello, darling,” Martha singsongs and blows him a kiss. “Goodnight, darling. I’ll leave you two to your fun.”

Kate dashes, cheeks ablaze, through the alcove and into the bedroom. “Wait!” she says. “I need to get out of these—“ She gestures at her clothes. Her image tilt’s crazily in the upper corner of the screen.

“Yes!” He nods like a drinking duck. “Out, out, damned clothes!”

He’s disappointed, though, when she leaves him staring up at the ceiling as she hastily shucks pants, blouse, underthings, hardly taking time even to fold them on the chair. He provides running commentary that stops abruptly when she grabs for the iPad and it travels up her bare thighs to the hem of his t-shirt and continues on to the low drape of the neck.

“You were saying?” She arches an eyebrow.

“I miss you,” he says, abruptly sweet and longing. “Wow.” His hand scrubs over his heart, and she knows how he feels. She understands the physical pang that runs so much deeper than this silly, clumsy flirting. “I _really_ miss you.”

“Me too.” She climbs on to the bed, his face rocking on the screen and hers along with it. “A lot.” She smiles at him and feels the thump of her pulse, the warm, heavy feeling that goes all the way out to her wrists, her ankles. “But it was good?”

“It was_ great.” _He lights up. He talks a mile a minute about how he winged the whole thing. She listens, nodding and laughing and drinking him in. He’s jet lagged to hell and back. His normally impeccable grammar is frayed at the edges, but he looks closer to whole than he has in months. “And I just had them right in the palm of my hand!”

“I’ll bet you did!” She grins with her head heavy on the pillow. She’s too tired, too grateful, too lonely for him to give him a little bit of a hard time like she usually would. “I’m really glad for you, Castle.”

“I’m glad, too.” He shifts modes again, from the electric high of positively owning a tough crowd to the unguarded intimacy of earlier. “I’m glad I came. Even with everything. Even though I miss you, like—_a lot._ I’m glad you …”

“Pushed you out the door?” she’s quoting him, teasing him, missing him like crazy.

“That.” He laughs. He sighs and stares out of the screen at her, a sappy smile on his face. “I’m glad you did that.”

“Me, too.” She reaches out to trace her fingertip along his cheek. His eyes close as though he can feel it across the miles, across an ocean. “Even with everything, I’m glad.”


	22. Superstar—Dead From New York (7 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s funny to him the way she genuinely has no desire for the spotlight. It’s mostly funny to him, though his ego has taken its lumps since Sid Ross’s body dropped into an elevator car and on to her desk. Even though there’s a slew of TV and movies he’ll never be able to watch again without gritting his teeth, because … Danny Valentine. Ew, as it turns out.

> _“I absolutely adore you. And you._ Especially_ you.”  
—Liz Bell, Dead from New York (7 x 22) _

* * *

It’s funny to him the way she genuinely has no desire for the spotlight. It’s mostly funny to him, though his ego has taken its lumps since Sid Ross’s body dropped into an elevator car and on to her desk. Even though there’s a slew of TV and movies he’ll never be able to watch again without gritting his teeth, because … Danny Valentine. _Ew,_ as it turns out.

But mostly it’s funny to him—both amusing and perplexing. She’s adorable in the moment. She blushes and deflects. She recovers quickly, of course, and he’s sure no one who hasn’t been hanging on her every word to find the rhythm and romance of her cadences would catch the slight hesitation in her speech, the merest shift in her posture, signaling that she’d like to run, because this kind of attention holds no appeal for her.

All of that makes him smile. It makes him want to eat her up, because most of the time cute isn’t the word for his badass wife. But it makes him wonder, too. Now that he’s really thinking about it—now that they’re on this case where unexpected members of her fan club lurk around every corner—it just strikes him as curious that in every scenario, she’d far rather fade into the background than take center stage.

It’s a tragic waste of a could-be superstar, of course. She is graceful, drop-dead gorgeous, a quick study, and really, she’s good at virtually everything already. She exudes intelligence and just a little bit of wickedness. She’s toe-curlingly commanding without being cold or brittle. Everything about her demands one’s full attention, and it’s just … odd how attention-averse she is when everything about her makes the world stop in its tracks as she moves through it. 

The whole Model Cop incident, complete with Natalie Rhodes flashbacks, really jars something loose in his mind, partly because he’s totally caught out. He is supposed to be helping to solve a murder, not contemplating how closely his wife approaches perfection, after all.

He’s studying Tina Whatever Her Name Is studying her. She mimics the swing of her hips, the set of her arms folded across her chest, the lift of her chin. He sees it’s a good imitation. He sees how well it’ll play on camera. He sees, for all that, how it’s hardly a shadow of her, and then suddenly she’s asking him something.

_Castle, please tell me I don’t move like that._

She’s watching him watching Tina watching her and this probably isn’t the time or place to fall at her feet and sing her praises, possibly in spontaneous verse. He has to do some deflection of his own.

_Is this a trick question? _

She fixes him with a split-second look that promises punishment in his near future, and his heart stutters in his chest. He flashes Tina Whatever an okay sign, because … _A_ for effort, Tina Whatever, but you’ll never be the star Kate Beckett could be, should be, is, whether she means to be or not. 

He keeps his head in the game after that, but he puzzles over it. He thinks about Liz the Pathetic Writer and her stupid questions about hair and high heels. He’s inclined to scoff at first—how would hair and heels dare to defy her will? And really, what do they have to do with the magnetic pull she has?

Something about the latter question lingers. It hangs out in a corner of his brain with the Model Cop moment and makes itself known again when suddenly she’s on live TV taking down a suspect. Her body is stiff and awkward and her face is blank with terror as he pulls her into a series of exaggerated bows. He has to bail her out, and it’s the weirdest thing that she wants no part of the spotlight, and yet—look at her. Just _look_ at her.

She’s adorable all over again with the boys when they tease and gush over her unintentional star turn. She blushes and deflects, but she’s a little pleased by it, too, and isn’t that interesting? She’s pleased, but all the same, she’s more than happy to cede the stage to his mother when she shows up with champagne and her phone carefully set to the Twitter thread someone must have helped her navigate to.

She’s wonderful at that, too—being the adoring fan, the proud daughter-in-law—and he’s just … overcome with love for her on top of everything else. He’s impatient to be home, to have her to himself, in bare feet, fresh scrubbed and stripped to the skin. 

It’s too long before he _does_ have her there, before he has her like that, and he’s hovering. He’s all over her. He crowds up behind her in the bathroom mirror, and he knows he’s playing with fire.

“Castle, quit it!” She ducks out from under the arm that’s trying to reel her in. She’s laughing, but she’s annoyed in earnest, too. “What is going on with you tonight?”

“Nothing.” He’s suddenly shy himself, suddenly tongue-tied and star struck.

She is so much _more _like this—puttering around with her hair scraped haphazardly up and out of the way, murmuring and singing to herself, tossing snatches of disjointed conversation back and forth with him about their day, about things that need doing around the house. Like this, she blazes with almost unbearable light and heat. He laughs to think how the hair, the heels, the impeccable wardrobe are a smokescreen. They’re a life-saving distraction for the rest of the world.

“Castle … ” she says again, and it’s all the warning he’ll get. She brandishes the electric toothbrush like weapon. “What?”

He draws back, hands in the air. He surrenders.

“Nothing,” he mumbles down at the floor. He steels himself with a deep breath and meets her glare with a dorky, dumbstruck grin. “It’s just … I’m such a big fan, Detective.”   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ugh. I know. The schmoop. I despise myself.


	23. Alight—Hollander's Woods (7 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s no surprise she’d feel nostalgic on a night like this. She’s teetering on the brink of enormous change as she slips her feet into the stilettos that match the fiery rose shade of her dress exactly, and everything resonates. The things that are the same, the things that are immeasurably different—they all have this weight to them. They come together, past and present, and tonight, they feel like they matter.

> _“One day you will look back and you will realize that every experience you’ve ever had, every seeming mistake or blind alley, was actually a straight line to who you were meant to be.”  
—Richard Castle, Hollander’s Woods (7 x 23) _

* * *

It’s no surprise she’d feel nostalgic on a night like this. She’s teetering on the brink of enormous change as she slips her feet into the stilettos that match the fiery rose shade of her dress exactly, and everything resonates. The things that are the same, the things that are immeasurably different—they all have this _weight _to them. They come together, past and present, and tonight, they feel like they matter.

“I’m not tying that tie for you,” she calls out as she straightens her hem in the mirror. She waits a beat, then adds, “Alexis is not tying that tie for you.” She laughs to herself as she swears she can hear his jaw snapping shut all the way from the office. “Get a move on,” she tells his reflection as it appears behind her.

“I need …” He trails off with his chin raised. There’s a tendril of blood wending its way down to disappear on an angle beneath the open collar of his shirt. “White,” he says with a thin little smile. “Unfortunate.”

“Not unfortunate.” She grabs him by the shirt front. Her heart clangs two different ways in her chest, _Then_ and _Now._ She goes with _Then, _because_ Now_ is he killed a man today. _Now _is he almost died. _Then_ is the very first truth between them and what comes next is her telling it at last. “I love a man in a white dress shirt.”

She tugs him toward the bathroom and finds what she needs in the giant, tackle box of a first aid kit that he keeps faithfully stocked as though he has an army of particularly accident-prone toddlers to care for. She carefully cleans the blood away. She kisses him as she holds pressure on the cut that’s smaller than it looks, less dangerous than it looks. She paints on the liquid bandage, holding his head still with a palm cupped at the nape of his neck as he hisses at the touch of the brush.

“I’d better get a lollipop for this,” he mutters.

“Fresh out.” She laughs and passes a thumb under his eye and along his temple. She passes it over the memory of another white tuxedo shirt, carelessly open at the throat, and wonders what became of his tie that night—that morning—when Karl Nadir’s fist met his face on the ground outside her unmarked. “But you were a good boy, so I’ll tie your tie for you.”

“Victory!” He lifts his hand as if to touch the still-drying bandage. She bats it away and sets to work on the tie. “I knew you’d give in,” he says with a smirk she’d lick right off his face if they weren’t already running so late.

“Think you’re smart, do you?” She pushes him away. “Jacket. Now!”

She smiles after him and thinks to herself that he probably did know. From then to now to what comes next, she sees the straight arrow of his determination, his will to make more of her than she’d ever imagined could be, and she thinks he probably did know she’d give in, she’d wise up, she’d be brave, and here they are. Here they go, and maybe he really did know all along, or maybe it’s just that tonight, everything resonates.

He helps the three of them into the limousine. He stands at the curb looking tall and proud and a little nervous. He pats his jacket pocket for the lone card of notes he’s bringing with him, then turns his full attention to the task at hand—three discrete moments. He’s over-the-top gallant with Alexis and has some sharp, fond exchange with his mother. He’s bowled over by her—she makes sure of that with the sway of her hips and the sultry_ Thanks, Babe_ that she pairs with a heated look as she brushes every inch of her body against his before slipping into the seat.

The event is a little bit of a blur, then to now to what comes next, and that unexpectedly unfolds in real time. Cameras flash, voices call out to draw their attention _Mr. Castle, Nikki, Richard Castle, Detective, Rick, Mr. and Mrs. Castle, _and that last one is new. That last one brings him to a stop right there in the middle of the red carpet. He kisses her, right there, whispering _Mr. Beckett _with a laugh as he pulls away, and she knows exactly the striking picture they’ll make, and tonight, she doesn’t mind.

She makes the rounds on his arm. The pride in his voice every time he introduces her—every time he talks her up, lists her accomplishments, looks at her, utterly smitten—still calls the blood into her cheeks. It still makes her heart drum hard. That hasn’t changed a bit in seven years, but she holds her head up now. She stands tall beside him and squeezes his hand when she needs to, because this is a proving ground, too. Whichever path she takes into the future, there’ll be who knows how many nights like this, and she’s lucky that he cleans up nice.

She laughs, a little giddy, at the thought. She whispers _Tell you later_ against his shoulder when he turns to her with a curious look. _Later,_ he whispers back like he can’t wait. Shutters click and bulbs flash around them. Another striking picture, and she feels ready, come what may.

He throws his speech out. In that last possible moment, she sees it happen. She feels it happen, thrumming along the line of connection between them. He casts a single glance at the card that’s been tucked in his pocket all night. He sets aside the carefully crafted points and the award alongside them. He speaks across the years, too, not just to her, but to all of them. In half a dozen sentences, he tells the story of what they have been, what they’ve come to be, and all the places they might go from here.

He centers her voice in the story, like always. He speaks through her and to her and about her and she knows things about herself she didn’t a moment ago. She knows things about him, because he’s shown her the secret to unearthing them, even though it scares him. It still scares him, and that’s thrilling and sobering and such a huge part of what her life’s work will be. _I had no idea,_ he says, and then and now collide, the scent and warmth of him, the tantalizing open throat his shirt. He always knew she’d give in.

He’s surrounded as he descends from the stage. He bobs on a sea of back pats and air kisses and bone-crushing handshakes. She hangs back. She never loses sight of him, he never loses sight of her, and finally a quiet spot opens up far from the bar just as the sea parts and they come together. He reaches for the tail end of the tie, but she stays his hand.

“Let me,” she says, tugging at it already, thumbing open the top two buttons of his shirt and pressing a kiss to his throat. No flashes this time, and that’s a minor miracle. It’s a striking picture for two. “Perfect.”

“It was okay?” he asks, sounding tired and a little bewildered, like he’s just landed with a thump back in his body—back in the now, and she can’t wait to hear the story of where he’s wandered.

“What did I just say?” She gives the careless ends of his tie a stern tug.

“Thought you meant this.” He catches her fingers and presses them to the fading warmth of he kiss on his skin. He skims his other hand along the silhouette of her body.

“That, too,” she says with a laugh, and suddenly they’re surrounded again. A sea of her people, this time. _Their _people, who’ve all been hanging back with their gruff congratulations and their rough and tumble thanks that sound a little like abuse, because seven years on, he’s still the new guy, he’ll always be the new guy, they’ll always be a little starstruck by him. That’s perfect, too.

The call from the precinct is proper punctuation for it all. It’s proof positive of what they’ve all just been saying. Things are going to change, but not everything. Not everything.

The scene is on their way, so they arrive in all their finery. He fishes her badge out of her tiny clutch for her and holds on to the bag as she joins Lanie over the body.

“Eyes up, Castle,” they say in unison, and he looks aggrieved.

“I wasn’t—” He appeals to Ryan and Esposito, who shake their heads in good natured disgust, then reach out to feed the birds. 

She changes back at the precinct. He protests, then offers to help. She shoves him away at the locker room door, then tugs him back to her. She kisses him up against the wall like it’s those first few days back from her suspension. It’s reckless and careful and new and old. She spins through the door and leaves him breathless.

She stows away the dress, the stilettos, the complicated array of underthings, in the garment bag that lives in her locker now, because she’s Mrs. Castle and on any given night, she’s still slipping on earrings as she slides into a five-star banquette next to him. He’s Mr. Beckett, and he’s pocketing his tie or rolling his french cuffs to the elbow as he ducks under the crime scene tape. These are the worlds they move between, ebb and flow, then and now and yet to be.

They sit, shoulder to shoulder, at the murder board. They snatch the marker from one another and crowd their thoughts in together, elbowing and jockeying for pride of place. The bullpen is loud and busy, then quiet and all but deserted, but for them. Her head is heavy, but her mind whirs over the details. 

“Enough,” he murmurs. He gathers her to him and breathes in the glittering evening on what lingers of her perfume. “Enough for now. Let’s go home.”

“Home,” she nods and the words conjure up the promise of a warm bath, of his kid-at-Christmas voice in the dark, telling her about teetering on the edge as he threw out his speech.

She reaches for the garment bag, but he beats her to it. He drapes it over one arm and offers her the other. She hesitates, enveloped in another memory. Then and now and everything that comes next.

“Not home. Not yet.” She slips her arm through his. It’s no wonder he always knew she’d give in. “Remi’s first. I’m starving.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well, friends, that’s it. As we all know, the series ends here, and so does this mad experiment at 151 stories for 151 episodes. Thank you all for reading and cheerleading and commenting and tweeting and reblogging. I kind of don’t know what I’m going to do with myself all night now.

**Author's Note:**

> I sort of thought I would quietly end with 6 x 23, but I was especially sleepless last night, so I wrote this. I don’t want to be the fic person who cried wolf, but I don’t think I am going to continue much farther. I wrote some longer things after the end of season 6 and in the beginning of 7. I feel like those wore out my authorial welcome in this timeframe, so if I do sort of peter out here, please know I appreciate those who have read these episode-related things so far. 


End file.
